I think it's mostly a matter of perspective. What often gets forgotten is that if we're talking about fantasy classics we're only talking about a very small sample of what was out there at the time. Namely the small part that got popular enough to still be talked about in 2024. The thing is, back then there was an awful lot of fantasy out there noone seems to remember and most of that stuff wasn't up to par in quality with the greats of the genre. And in that respect, not much has changed and the number of fantasy books that are really outstanding in quality is still very small. Comparing modern stuff to Tolkien also seems kinda unfair to me, because there's a reason for the huge impact those books had and it's really hard to duplicate that feat. This said, there's still quite a few modern authors that have the same kind of impact on me Tolkien had back then and that fill me with the same kind of wonder and mystery he did. The amount of really good stuff might even be bigger than it was back then, and there might be a reason why you kept going back to Tolkien and Hobb that much. Because even in their time, those two were/are the exception, not the norm.
Even if we end up with a bias toward remembering only the best works of the past, it is still useful to understand the different ways in which works, both high and low quality, manifest differently in different times. Living on a media diet of only one era often means adopting the critical blindness of that era, and if we think that this blindness is only a thing of the past, then we'll be in for a big surprise when our critical outlook is also seen as "outdated."
90s fantasy novel fare was imo much better than today. You have a few standouts today but I remember going to the book store as a kid and what was on offer. It's like, one standard deviation on average below that.
As a teacher, I think that a lot of authors don’t realize that making their theme clear is not the same thing as making their themes convincing. The advantage of the storytelling medium is that it can lead the readers to drawing the conclusion you want them to conclude. You interrupt that possibility by telling them outright what to think. Readers who already agree with you will find it, convincing, of course, a readers who do not already agree with you will recognize that the opinion on the page is not their own, but rather the author’s. At the end of the day, writing is a skill, and not all authors are equally masterful in it.
“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history - true or feigned- with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.” The Lord of the Rings - Foreword to the Second Edition (October, 1966)
IIRC there's a scene in one of the Ice Age movies where a character tries to tell Peaches, Manny's daughter, to do something, which she refuses. Manny then simply explains the situation to Peaches and imply how it is in her interest to do something which aligns with what the previous character told her, which cause Peaches to want to do that thing. Manny then explains that Peaches is more likely to do something if she thinks she came up with the idea.
One thing i hate is how unimmersive some modern fantasy is In game of thrones characters talked like people who are a part of the world and people looked like where they came from, so northen people have black hair and white, dornish people have brown skin and curly hair It may sound silly to people but i just like it when fantasy is more grounded and immersive like this, and they don't talk like college students or look like a multicultural convention but they all somehow come from the same place
I’ve tried to explain this to people before but they want to call me a racist or what I’m saying racist so badly that they can’t hear my point. It’s not that I mind an inclusive setting. I just want the setting to feel real. If you have some small farming town in the middle of a Western European like setting (Wheel of Time) then why does it have the diversity of a California suburb and in roughly the same proportions? (the TV series). I’m not saying you can’t do it, but it does need some rationale because people in ancient times didn’t distribute like that. Fucking Brigerton pulled if off with just a few lines of dialogue that explained their more enlightened England, but Wheel of TV just did it because of whatever and it felt forced and fake. Again, I’m not saying don’t be inclusive or don’t have a diverse cast. Just find a way to make it make sense. My wife was like “so you wouldn’t mind an all black cast?” No. I wouldn’t. The Broken Earth Trilogy should have an all black or at least all non-white cast because that is how the world was defined in the books. And it’s one of the best fantasy series I’ve ever read. Wild Seed (which should absolutely be made into a film or series) would have a diverse cast and for good reason. But yeah, I agree. The world has to feel real. Disregarding that shows an incredible lack of respect for the source material.
@@stillmattwest So for you the issue isn't with the brown people existing in stories set in fantasy worlds when the climate is like western europe. It's writers failing to add dialogue along the lines of "these people are brown because of x", and therefore not lining up with your knowledge of "ancient people" in the real world. Well if an explanation is all you need to make a setting feel real, then for WoT I can sort that in one sentence. "WoT is set in the distant future as well as the distant past." Problem solved. For other media, the next time seeing a non-white person makes the setting feel unreal, do this. Imagine the non-white people are non-white because a magic rock fell in a stream, then their ancestors drank varying amounts of that water and one of the side effects was their children not being white. Future problems solved. If you require an explanation if some of the people in a fantasy world are brown, but you don't need it explained when some of the people are human and some of them aren't or when a dragon can fly, then despite your claim of not minding an inclusive setting, I think you do. And I can see why people want to call you racist.
@@stillmattwest I'ts especially bad in Wheel of Times because in the books people all the time point out how Rand looks like an Aiel rather than coming from the village where he grew up. Having him stick out is a vital plot element.
I've been railing against this in modern fantasy for some time now. Fantasy cities, towns, and villages shouldn't be as ethnically and racially diverse as downtown New York or LA without some logical in world reason for it - and even then, it should be cause some fairly major problems. The Netflix adaptation of the Witcher is a great example of why this trend is so terrible. The Witcher relies on heavy themes of alienation, fear of the other, and found family, but by filling both the main cast and background actors with modern tokenism the Netflix adaptation directly undermines the themes of the work. It's difficult to buy the (somewhat justified) fear and bigotry of the Witcher's world when every blip of civilization appears to exist in some sort of post-racial fever dream. This doesn't just apply when the themes call for it either. Seeing ten different groups of disparate peoples living, conflict free, in places where it doesn't make any sense absolutely craters the general logic and believability of a setting.
@ I think you should stop deluding yourself and just admit you don’t like it when a cast isn’t all white. Consider how much “railing” you do when there’s no “logical in world reason” for the existence of that dragon or that magic ring. Then think about how upset you are when an actor is not white.
about the "modern books aren't subtle" thing, i get it and i do prefer subtler stuff, but at the same time, media literacy is at an all time low, I've seen way too many people misrepresent/miss the point on things that are so obvious that i can't really blame authors for not wanting to be misunderstood, especially since "death of the author" is the popular mindset these days.
This, I think, is a huge part of it. The internet changes how information spreads, and getting taken out of context is easy - and one bad misinterpretation, by someone with a platform can cause a lot of heat to the author. I had a couple authors comment to me in relationship to my video that this was actually a concern for them. I don't blame people for not wanting to be misunderstood. When people misunderstand me in my video I feel frustrated! Not an easy problem to solve.
I came to make this comment. I also think some of it is newer authors who don't know how to soft hand thematic elements, though I think your point is significantly more common
@@Arkantos117 they *shouldn't*, but that's much easier said than done. I would've said it was no big deal and I wouldn't care until I started experiencing piles-on on the internet. Now I understand it's more complicated, and I don't even have that large of an audience comparatively.
As a university lecturer I can say that what seems obvious to me in narratives is completely missed by my students. It seems like the US is losing its critical reading/viewing skills in younger generations overall because we are not teaching them to read long form works and be able to understand how things like themes, metaphor, and symbolism are used over the course of a narrative. They need to notice things and recall them later to get something like foreshadowing or symbolism. But if we don’t teach these things and kids don’t read, how will they know that is a thing? Even in film, which is what I teach, students rarely are paying attention to what they’re watching to the degree that I do and so miss the subtle unspoken things, and even spoken things, that give them exposition or that symbolize rather than literally stating a thing. The show don’t tell. But they have to tell because they don’t get it if they are just shown. So I end up having to spell it out for them pointing out “hey you remember how it showed us this? That was to let you know this.” Then they’re all like “oh!” If people are not paying attention or have the attention span for long form narrative (this includes TV eps, films, novels, even podcast episodes) then can you really be surprised that authors and filmmakers have to be more overt in their themes? It’s annoying for those of us who know how stories work but necessary for those who don’t to have a chance to get it. And even then they still might not because they’re not paying attention. 😑
I absolutely notice this with my younger cousins. There's almost zero comprehension of subtlety or nuance which is so baffling to me. They cannot follow a plot line and their limited vocabulary is very disappointing. I try to get them enthusiastic about books or a specific movie but sometimes it's like talking to a wall. It makes me want to cry. :( I could not imagine having to teach and see the brain rot on a daily basis.
At the same time, it’s not fair to dumb stuff down for others though. Artists shouldn’t have force points, they should have the freedom to have the subtlety.
This is such a sad, yet insightful observation you've shared. It's a shame--my instinct is to suggest that we need more challenging artwork, not less, to encourage growth and to build up their comprehension skills. Yet I also understand the desire to run away from challenging media when the whole point of art is, at least partly, to be entertainment. What young person is going to be entertained by something they can't understand? I wish there was an easier way to inspire them to enjoy challenging themselves with their media, but how do you convince someone who is used to only eating junk food that a salad could be delicious, too?
I have to question how universal or long term this is. Public schooling is less than 200 years old, majority adult basic literacy is only 100 years old at best (my family has records from that time where some of them signed with x's because they couldnt write their own name) I'm honestly sceptical that we're not simply seeing the result of most the populace having basic literacy, so can theoritically access literature and media but dont have much in the way of long term support from advanced literate family members or infrastructure that can teach that. I reckon its going to ebb and flow, although pop culture or folk culture or low culture etc etc has always been seen as vulgar, uncultured and stupid (when simply lacking learning time in an appropriate environment is still common)
There's a quote I can't find, but it goes something like - "the best books you'll ever read will be the ones you read between the ages of fourteen and sixteen." I think the age might be a bit low, but it's a profound truth. The first time we're exposed to an idea, we find it amazing and deep and clever. The fortieth time, we find it boring and obvious and derivative. We can still find great enjoyment from fiction as adults, but we can't get that sense of wonder back. It's like how people will swear that the best music ever released was during their university years. Sometimes, we just miss the person we were when we first encountered it.
I find that to be untrue. I can read Shakespeare or the Epic of Gilgamesh today, at the age of 41 (I'd never read A Midsummer Night's Dream or Gilgamesh before) and I get the exact same kind of wonder I had for LOTR when I read those books when I was 15. I don't get the same from most modern fantasy books (A number of Brandon Sanderson's works-some-not most; and ASOIAF being the main exceptions). I get the same wonder from Earthsea. But I don't for the likes of Malazan for the most part, or for the First Law books, or the much lauded Rothfuss series, for example. I loved all these latter ones as well, even more than I loved Sanderson's stuff, but they don't hit the same for some reason. It has to do with the themes, the way wonder and magic is being conveyed, the characters, the journeys taken, than anything having to do with age, I think.
@@Ψυχήμίασμα I would guess it's more of a first love situation... the first time you read fantasy is going to have an impact on you that you can't reproduce by going back to the same well. You can still experience it multiple times, but not from that same source. Unfortunately our brains seem wired to keep looking for it in the same place we found it last time, which is the only place it can never be found again. I've felt it the first time I read fantasy, the first time I played a JRPG, the first time I played an MMO, the first time I learned a new language, etc. Often it seems you also only realize it in retrospect.
@@cristianhakansson7443 But I still have that same wonder whenever I reread LOTR. And I also do for stuff like The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, which is something I'd only discovered in my 30s. That series is completely different from typical high fantasy. With totally different themes. My thesis is the opposite. Sure, there might be some kind of "childhood exposure effect" but I don't think that's what this video is talking about or what I am trying to convey. My analysis is that post the 2000s, writing in fantasy has both thematically and stylistically shifted. Many are great fantasy works, contain very profound themes, don't get me wrong, but they are no longer going for the classical sense of folklore and myth that older works did. The feel, the sensibilities, the prose, the very language, is changed. I feel like many modern fantasy feels mundane. they don't transport me to another time and place, even though on the page the characters aren't on 21st Century Earth. I would draw an analogy to art. Modern fantasy feels like photography sometimes, or Stuckism, lol, but classical fantasy feels like I'm looking at pre-Raphaelite paintings.
I still remember the first time I read a book where the PoV character changed every other chapter. It blew my mind when I noticed that it was happening.
"Hard magic system" is magic adapted to the modern, science-oriented mind. We need to know exactly how it works, its rules, equations and what we can do with it. It has become like gravity.
@@PierzStyx Science Fantasy is also a genre and while it has a different feel than hard magic systems they do share commonalities. After all, people who think magic is mystical is from lack of understanding. The unknown as you will. It's a play of perceptions and reality.
I don't think it's "science-oriented". Science is all about uncovering mysteries. If you don't have mysteries, you can't have science. So there is something post-scientific about world with no mysteries.
I actually hate most of that, I want magic to be as strange to understand as life. There are some I do like but most take away existement from the story
and you think magicians wouldn't want to know how their powers work? the scientists want to know how the world works?even historical "wizards" studied how their craft worked, is why we got all those ancient scripts detailing how they thought, like the keys of solomon
My problem with hard magic systems is that they often feel like some kind of separate extra physics. In myths and legends, the laws of nature themselves are fuzzy and ill-understood, and magic is just part of them. Imagine making things like bronze, or steel, or even just beer or cheese, without knowing anything about solid state physics or chemistry or microbiology. That was people’s reality for thousands of years. If a famed blacksmith figured out a special quenching technique to harden his swords, that might seem just as “magical” as a spell. With a hard magic system, you are introducing a division between magic and the rest of nature (which ostensibly follows our known laws of physics). It can be great in its own right, but care must be taken in terms of consistency within itself and the world around it.
Great point, its a problem that compounds whenever there are unkown rules to the magic system the heroes will learn before the final battle, because you cannot really discover those rules by experimentation of natural phenomena One of the series with the best hard magic system i have ever seen is Reverend Insanity, where everything can be turned into magic if taken far enough, and as such magic is always evolving and everybody has to either adapt to the times or go even deeper into their own magic Cooking could become magic, singing could become magic, lifting weights became magic, even personal experiences could be turned into magic if you lived with enough intensity Those make for some truly epic moments, when a guy persevered so hard it became magic, someone loved so hard it became magic, someone took care of others so hard it became magic, someone killed so hard it became magic, its just badass
The thing is “they did know” about chemistry or biology as it applied to their world, as they did about witchcraft and magic. They also had a “language” and a “process” - just not in modern terms. In modern writing, authors often make the mistake of explaining to is in “modern” terms, not “world” terms
You've eloquently put into words what I've been trying to say for years. "Hard" fantasy just feels like sci-fi with a LotR skin stretched over it. Not a bad thing, per se, but I don't go to the pizzeria to eat great tacos, if you catch my drift.
Example of what I mean: “For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem also to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy.” - Galadriel to Sam in Fellowship of the Ring, talking about the mirror.
I personally love hard magic systems as long as they are thematic important. Yeah, soft magic systems or traditional fantasy provide wonder, but in certain moments, they can feel like deus ex machinas. Hard magic system only proposes that if you are going to add this variable that doesnt exist in the real world, it should make or have inner logic. Randomness can even function as innner logic as long as you intented it that way. I get that in some stories, can feel like an added level of physics, but I still think hard magic system stories have the potential to be better than their counterpart when they relate to the themes of the story. Avatar The Last Airbender is a great example. The ussage of the elements is related to the character arcs of the main characters and antagonist. Even some aspects of traditional fantasy like the One Ring of Lord of Rings are hard magic and thus, their rules are well stablished but also challenge our protagonist believes.
I’ve never understood the so-called "Tolkien fatigue." Speaking from my own experience-and I admit I haven’t read all the classic fantasy books-it seems to me that most fantasy authors are fully realized creators in their own right. I’ve read works by Ursula Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, Robert Howard, Terry Pratchett, Glen Cook, Gene Wolfe, Roger Zelazny, Peter S. Beagle and others. None of them gave me the impression of being 'just as Tolkien, nothing new'. The only series that came close might be The Wheel of Time, but even that feels more like a tribute to classic tropes than a mere imitation of The Lord of the Rings. So, I honestly don’t understand what people are reading if they think fantasy has been dominated by Tolkien knock-offs. Also, 'generic fantasy' in my understanding is something more DnD or WoW style, not Tolkien style.
The reality is writers can't make a living pouring their mind and soul into a single world like Tolkien did. He spent decades building his world, languages, cultures... modern writers, unless already retired, can't afford to take that long. Professional writers have like a two year cycle between releases, sometimes less.
Strict deadlines for professional writers isn't modern. For the last couple centuries professional writers often made their living publishing serials in newspapers with strict deadlines. The best serials were collected into published novels. The best novels were reprinted, translated, and remembered. When paperbacks first came out, new popular fiction authors could be published cheaply as 'dime store novels.' The most popular authors were given better quality publications, translations, and remembered. It's not the publishers that have drastically changed, it's the readers. We no longer allow for a 'test run' on new authors. Periodicals are nearly dead. First editions must be printed on expensive, acid free paper. Outside of self publishing -which is cheaper and more competitive than ever- there's no way to vet a new author's potential popularity before making the heavy investment of a quality printing. Needing some security before investing has pushed major publishing companies into the same spiral as the film industry. They look at what's popular, try to guess what made that popular, come up with a model, find something new that fits the model, and push this new thing. The new thing is successful because it was heavily marketed, the model is reinforced, the quality of the final product drops.
i'm considering working on my magnum opus for as long as i like in my free time and setting myself official work hours in which i churn out works that are on trend under a pen name to get around this problem - essentially to churn out trash until i can afford to self publish something i am actually proud of. that is if i take writing seriously as a career path....
Tolkien wasnt a professional writer: he was a prefosser at Oxford, and then retired and usually wrote as a hobby. A lot of old classic writers either had a steady day life, or came from money, the idea of a starving artist has always been out of touch because you often have to be well to do to go into the arts at all. If anything it used to be much worse
For me another thing that makes LOTR so timeless is language. It´s written in a way that I feel like the story I´m reading is really part of the world it takes place in. The world feels like it has thousands of years of history and stories and Tolkien´s language blends in very well. Nothing feels out of place. And what makes it so good in my opinion is the universality of the topics. It´s a story of good and evil, fear and valor, friendship and love, loyalty and betrayal, life and death, and it shows that even the smallest among us can make a difference. These are universal topics everyone can relate to and they touch our hearts in a special way. Sam talks to Frodo about the great stories they grew up with, the stories that meant something, and Tolkien manages to make their story feel like one of these great stories that outlast time. Like in a thousand years every child in Middle Earth will know the story of the fellowship.
There's perhaps a bit of irony in the fact that this discussion happens at such a rapid pace with so many in-your-face editing elements. I recognize that's the style of video that UA-cam seems to prefer, but that might be an instructive parallel.
i was gonna comment something about how the speech in the video almost seemed to bombard me. like, leaving a second of air between a sentence can really help people remember what you just said, but i think tiktok has really trained people to detest dead air in content. sucks.
I hate that I have to keep saying this, and I know I'm shouting into a very deep and dark well, but fantasy in the 80s and 90s was not all Tolkien clones. I'm not saying some authors didnt directly copy Tolkien (Terry Brooks and David Eddings, for example), but the deconstruction started as soon as LOTR was published. Even the Wheel of Time, which people incorrectly refer to as "classic fantasy," is a deconstruction of hero myths. The part that really cracks me up is that authors like R.F. Kuang go around acting like the last thirty years NEVER HAPPENED. As if ASOIAF didn't make all the points; as if fantasy is still about chosen ones and prophecies and all the books are based on medieval Europe. That's nonsense. But when they keep saying it, literary agents believe it. Everyone has a totally warped perception of the genre, despite the changes they've successfully made. Fantasy wasn't even like that in the 80s. I was there! So to answer your question, yes fantasy has lost its soul because a lot of writers, agents, and editors haven't done their homework.
Yup. Even before that too. Elric, Conan, Black Company, Book of the New Sun, Dragonriders of Pern, Thomas Covenant, Chronicles of Amber, Gormenghast, and hundreds more. Even the 'Tolkien clones' aren't as generic as people make them out to be. Belgariad, Shanarra, Riftwar, Wheel of Time, Dragonlance, etc all form their own unique identities in spite of their familiar beginnings.
@nightmarishcompositions4536 Yeah, I mean i wasn't even thinking of all those! 😄 Conan was just as much a force in the eighties as Tolkien was. Look at all the Conan clones. Even when there are superficial similarities, it doesn't mean Tolkien gets the credit. It's a stretch to say Dragonslayer or Krull were Tolkien clones. Because they have wizards? Tolkien didn't invent wizards, elves, or short people. He was part of a genre. Interesting that I always hear about Tolkien clones from people born after 1990.
Yeah. A lot of Diana Wynne Jones' books were written before the 90's. And they are not at all Tolkien clones, not a single one of her books that I have read. And I have read most of her library. "The Dalmark Quartet" is the only series of hers that could be considered somewhat similar. But it is not really. Sadly, she is massively underrated, and rarely gets brought up in discussions, about fantasy novels. Maybe it is because her books are a bit weird?
@Cattensu All it takes is finding a good used book store and browsing the covers. Even if you weren't alive at the time (like I was) all it takes is not believing the hype.
Disclaimer: I LOVE hard magic systems, I prefer them to soft magic systems the majority of the time. That being said... As a big time Mistborn fan, your first point on the balance of revealed powers vs withholding information is exactly why I like that trilogy so much. The final fight in book 1 is obviously a great moment that feels very "classic fantasy" to me, with the mist surrounding Vin and untold power swelling into her, giving her the strength she needs. It's an awesome scene, but it also comes across as more of a soft magic system. Fine by me, I grew up reading soft magic systems in YA fantasy for years. I had very little clue that anything different existed, hard magic wasn't even a phrase I had heard before. It wasn't until reading book 3 that my mind was truly blown. The fact that Brandon planned out a single, very specific reason as to why the mists could only surround Vin in that one moment blew my mind. It felt like some kind of awakening; this realization that cool moments in books didn't have to happen simply because the story demanded them. I think later series I have read by Brandon (along with other authors) have lacked some of that mystery and wonder. He almost explains things too quickly now, with much of the plot of his recent books feeling like some type of magical science fair project (I'm talking recent Stormlight entries along with his Cosmere based Secret Project books, only Yumi and the Nightmare painter left me feeling awe in regard to the magic). In a perfect world I would like to see more of that mystery return. I hope there are reasons that the magic works the way it does, but I hope authors aren't in a rush to reveal those reasons to us too hastily.
I agree with you on being hand feed all the information. There's a big difference between leading people to the message of your novel through subtle hints and the way people/animals and culture interact with the environment, and then just being talked at.
I agree with that, but I disagree when he says LoTR is subtle in its messaging... Especially, regarding the good vs evil and friendship part... It's pretty heavy handed... Sauron is constantly called evil and corruption literally makes people old and ugly...
@@miss1of2 Sauron was the handsomest being for millenia, hell his beauty was one of the reasons why the Numenoreans and the Eriador elfs fell. Being white and black doesn' mean it isn't subtle. Even the queenly Galadriel and the princely Boromir are tempted be the power to protect they people,
One result of a heavy focus on world-building seems to me that many authors feel like they need to STUFF all that into the book explicitly. I like it best when the author has clearly thought out a fully realised and consistent world history and magic system, but does not feel the need to share every last detail in the book. When they've got it all figured out, but don't weigh the narrative down with the details, the storytelling feels more natural, the reader still has a sense of wonder over the mysteries, and yet you don't have sudden shifts in rules because the author is working within their world consistently.
As a college student, I somehow appreciate that modern fantasy books are smaller sagas and because of that, the pace isn't as slow as it was back then. What I mean is that as someone who loves to read but doesn't have the time to get involved in a larger saga, it's refreshing to find books that I can dive into and that don't take up so much time. While I know that quality over quantity is always a point to consider when reading, there are good modern fantasy books out there that while short, handle their world well, even if they have to opt to clarify things for you because they don't have the advantage of having hundreds of parts to break this information down into. I also feel that it's important to keep in mind that these are different times and it's not bad that the way of doing fantasy changes with them and adapts to people's lifestyles. Maybe the video is referring to bland fantasy that you see a lot on Book tok, but it's still a bit unfair to say that all modern fantasy is worse than ancient fantasy without touching on the point of the context we currently live in.
Great explanation of the ubi sunt theme, Johan! My feeling is that a lot of the preferences you find in modern fantasy, such as less description and less room for thematic development, are a result of people’s expectations for storytelling being heavily influenced by stories on screens. An example: As much as I enjoy Jackson’s LOTR films, they actually are much faster-paced than the books and lose a great deal of the reverence (though not all of it) that is derived from the “slower” moments in the books. And yet, many people growing up on fantasy today express a strong preference for the films over the books.
Thank you for teaching me about ubi sunt! I can definitely imagine that people's expectations are having a significant impact on modern-day storytelling.
That’s the impression I got from reading old fantasy and new fantasy. Reading Robert E Howard’s Kull, the action scenes are very descriptive and detailed. It’s not necessarily fast paced, but it’s immersive And then looking at Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, that although it has an interesting world, it’s not as well detailed with its metaphors and writing when you compare to a writer like Gene Wolfe.
Then you get Robert Jordan describing every button on every coat on every person in every room and every plate of food they eat for aaaages. There’s such a thing as too much description. And lack of metaphor doesn’t mean lack of subtext. Mistborn has a history and mysticism going back a thousand years just in its plot, refers to plots and events in a system which spans layers of reality, has a spiritual history going back millions of years to a history and origin that is still steeped in mystery (Who or what was Adonalsium, what are the shards shards of, layered of thought and metaphor as plains with physicality being only one layer of reality, who or what is Hoid, has causes and effects in a wider context with a fixed history and future, causes and effects, emotional outcomes, right and wrings and moral greys and when is doing wrong for the right reasons acceptable, when does it go too far with The Crew doing the same thing for the same reason as The Lord Ruler but how far is too far, and if the outcome is bad but not as bad as the alternative is it justified or not, when does being righteous trying to do good become evil and tyranny) and alludes to to a wider cosmos. And that’s barely scratching the surface. I don’t think that not using a lot of metaphors means a lack of depth.
For me, its Darksouls. Elden ring. Bloodborn. Those game struck something in me, made me realize , rich story telling doesnt have to be rich to be perceived as rich. People will fill the gaps, inside their head and make it rich anyway. The power and beauty of that aspect is that most people will never "craft" a story inside their heads that is " bad " they will naturally think and connect dots and create the world the way they want it to be more than what it actually is. Between someone mental imagination versus words on page, one is more powerful than the other. Essentially, a good author is not someone that will print and copy paste the real story exactly as it is, inside the reader head ; a good author is someone that will tell just enough for the reader to actually become the writer, and create the story himself. Its an art though. A fine line between letting the reader confused and letting the reader become the creator.
I LOVED the movies when they came out but the older I get the less I like them. The books are much more emotional and tragic than the movies. Peter Jackson gave Arwen way more screen time but somehow conveyed less of her and Aragorn’s relationship. The Cerin Amroth scene in the books is short but it rips my heart out.
Quiet simple, really. Fantasy is no longer written by "poets" If you look at early 20th century writers is that many of them were either studied poetry, or were practitioners of it. Clark Ashton Smith. Howard, E.R. Eddison, Dunsany etc... have all dabbled in poetry or it was their passion before even writing prose. And all that had seeped into their work. There's a skillset to poetry, beyond just rhyming words, that's about how to write mood, a good cadence, about suggestion and abstraction. In short: atmosphere. In time, though, they phased out of the business and we all, audience and writers alike, have grown content with whatever the genre conventions of the time except us to write and except us to read, thus one generation of copycats are replaced by another and so it shall be again, indie is no exception. "Woe onto the nerds." - Tolkien probably.
Pretty much, poets and translators of poetry, most of them. That kind of thing makes a difference. Ours is an age almost entirely devoid of poetry, that generation of 1880-1920 was the last one in which truly great poets were active in quantity enough to shape sensibility in scale. What makes me sad is that poetry is so dead, and people so unaware of the skillset required, that most people would just dismiss the entire conversation as "there is nothing objective about literary merit, it is just opinion, and any opinion is as good as any other". Very sad state of affairs
I would also add that many great writers dabbled in things like philosophy and theology as well. That was a theme among the Inklings. Poetry, philosophy and theology.
YES! I recently read a quote about why The Simpsons isn't as good as it used to be: "The early Simpsons writers were experts in history, literature, politics, physics, chemistry, art, and nearly everything else. Current Simpsons writers are experts in The Simpsons." I think that applies analogously to modern fantasy authors.
Interesting to think of LOTR as not modern. LOTR was the herald of Modern fantasy, really the transition to modern fantasy. Old School Fantasy was Robert E Howard, C. L. Moore, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, William Morris, James Cabel Branch, H Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, E. R. Eddison, And if you really want to reach Ludovico Ariosto, and Edmund Spenser. There was fantasy before Tolkien.
It was the herald of modern fantasy 20yrs ago. Present day modern fantasy is a different animal. Game of Thrones left its mark, and the lower literacy rate has exploded a lot of teen/middle grade level books.
Howard, Lovecraft and Burroughs are favorites for me. Lovecraft benign the hardest to read given how he wrote but he is also the one who made the largest foot print in Horror. Side note all three were good old fashion American pulp writers.
I read a bunch of Conan stories recently and I was struck by how modern some of them felt. Much more so than LotR. There are some that were not and would be unpublishable today, but yeah.
@@Tessa_Ru Yeah if anything I'd argue Harry Potter (as much as it pains me to say) is the herald of modern fantasy as it lead to the YA explosion and many of the currently new and upcoming authors are the generation that grew up on those books and so are likely to be directly inspired/influenced by them.
I think another issue is the general fear of sincerity; most creators (whether they be writers, musicians, artists, etc.) are afraid of being vulnerable, so they have to wrap everything in multiple layers of irony and meta-jokes and pop-culture references and such. They don't want to just tell a sincere story.
If you've not read it already, Fonda Lee's Jade Trilogy is one of my favorite examples of modern fantasy with a very well-thought hard magic system and excellent character development. She writes action scenes very well, which is sometimes hard to do.
I'm asking myself a lot of these same questions while I'm writing my own SFF book. How much do I explain/leave out? How much do I trust the reader? How much do I trust myself, the writer? I tend to lean the same way you do: I prefer room for interpretation. So my book will probably end up with a lot of such room, but my love for modern fantasy will help me find a (hopefully) happy balance.
Just a thought that popped into my head, it hasn't had time to put down roots yet - but it occurs to me that a good rule of thumb when using fantasy to develop your own beliefs is to ensure that the debate could have turned out elsewise. Take the theme of oppression for example; an overly polemic story will insist that the opressed will always rise up and make a better world, tyranny is evil and is doomed to fail, and so the plot will play out like simple wish fulfillment. A fuller exploration of the subject might make you wonder if they can or will succeed, show the cost in human life of inspiring simple people to rise in revolution, and even suggest the danger of something even worse rising from the chaos and bloodshed. Even Lord of the Rings, an archtype of 'good triumphing over evil', gets a lot of its depth from the sacrifice Frodo makes, and how he can never go back to his Edenic existence. We talk about making 3d villains, maybe we could also talk about how themes should be 3-dimensionalised as well.
Magic systems and mystery have to do with whether or not your main character can do magic. In LOTR, our main characters couldn't actually do magic so it didn't make sense that they would be able to understand the limits of Gandalf's power. In Harry Potter, it would have been super weird if wizards didn't understand the limits of their power - which is why Harry had to be mortal-raised and a student.
For all you can praise rhe guy, and maybe rightfully so, I think so many of these changes can be traced directly back to Brandon Sanderson. Something I don't often see brought up is how fruustratingly unsubtle he is about his characters and themes. I think he set the pace for characters who will loudly and unsubtly announce "this is how i feel!!!" And everyone loving it
I am just reading Fellowship of the Ring and the whole scene of Tom Bombadil was so bizarre but wholesome! hahah I died with you almost singing "old tom bombadil! he's a merry fellow!" Great video!
i do find him a strange lad yet the passages where Tom helps the hobbits understand the "lives of trees" and talks about times long past reaching back to an age "before the seas were bent" are some of my most favourite in all of Tolkien :)
Frodo didn't say "I don't know why, it makes me sad". Sam said it. It's a telescoping of Sam's interest in and sympathy for the Elves in the book. He's always hankering after stories about Elves, and he says several times how much he wants to see them.
I noticed that the change in publishing made an enormous difference in books nowadays. Publishing has become a lot more accessible to more people, and while that sometimes can be a good thing (stories and themes that were hard to get through can now be written and more easily published), it also created a lack of professionalism. I've started to read a lot again the last two years, and with newer books I noticed most of them have a fun idea for a world, an okayish understanding of the themes they want to write about, and reasonable character building and dialogue, but rarely know the language to convey those things. Most of these books come across as if the writers love books, but never studied language, and the language needed to write world- and character building, or how to write visually, or to write fluent dialogue. There are a lot of books I read I was sure it was a debut novel that turned out to be the fifth book or something published, where I was wondering what the editors were doing and if they were even present. There are still a lot good books written (I have read a lot of good books too), but it's harder to find them in the sea of these books. On the other hand, I've also heard authors complaining about the fan base of books, and the discourse of fans, mostly online, where (dark) romance seems to be very popular, where it's almost impossible for the books that aren't about these things to get noticed and talked about. Marketing of books really changed due to things like book tiktok, and it's become a lot harder for books to find it's right audience, where it's both hard for the readers to find the books they want to read, and the authors to sell their books because it doesn't find the right fans. I at least find it rather difficult to find the books I want to read. It's the weird idea of books being marketed for as large an audience as possible, instead of books finding the right readers. I personally found Twilight for this reason absolutely horrible, I never read it, but it changed the fantasy selection in the library and bookstores so drastically that for a while any fantasy books I found were actually romance in a meh to okayish written fantasy world, and it's actually why I stopped reading for a couple of years. I'm not a fan of romance in fantasy (or most book genres) in general because too often it's just 'he's a guy, she's a girl, of course they'll become a couple', and I find that very boring character- and relationship building.
It might just be the books I picked up, but a lot of newer books I read also feel kind of like fanfiction in that in a lot of books the main characters feels like a self insert from the author, or 'as bland as possible so as many people as possible can identify with them' characters. I remember older books I read where the characters where allowed to be kind of weird, or eccentric, their own being, they were all allowed to just be all very different characters, it felt like you met a new character, instead of being like 'do I see myself in their shoes'. Like if we take LOTR for example, they were all their own character, with their own story, their own feelings and experience of the world, their own place in the world and in the story. It wasn't a 'do I see myself in Aragon's shoes', but a 'what a great character'. Not saying you didn't have self insert of bland characters in the past, because that has always been a thing, it's just that these seems to be very normalized and the norm in most fantasy books. But maybe I need to find better books (please, give me recommendations :D).
This is a very good and thorough analysis of the situation. And I think it deserves more concern, because it spoils the way future generations will read stories, watch movies and experience things in general.
@@AB-dz7lo The point is that everybody who takes the time to write down a story tends to think that they are a wise genius having written a work of art that is perfect. Publishers of the past usually gave this a reality check and worked with writers in order to cut the gem, make it shine and put it into a wider context. Behind every influential literary movement in history there was usually a visionary publisher. The problems described here are in no small part due to a world of self-publicized vanity projects and fanfiction that infected modern publishing as well. At this point those publishers are merely printers and distributors.
As someone who deals a lot with traditional publishers in the IT area "professionalism" is not what comes to mind when looking at the way they barely have a grasp of the books they themselves publish, mixing up categories, their inability to even tell which book is which in a certain series or even the publishing dates or authors in many cases. I think you might be thinking more of a more iterative and longer editing process with experienced editors with older books.
The modern works are often shallow, pretending to be deep. But LOTR is a depth of histories and cultures built just to tell this story. People might criticize LOTR for seeming like a "softhard core. Because they don't know about Eru and Melkor and the Maiar, etc,... But really, I do believe, it's only delivered that way so as to preserve the sense of wonder in the things not fully known to all. In truth, there is a deep lore and rules to everything, but we only see the characters going through the world and learning parts. That kind of world world building is so hardcore. As for the deus ex machina... I think when it's set up well and pays off, we call it the Eucatastrophe which Tolkien talked about, and it's a powerful reminder that even at the brink of death, hope can arrive unexpectedly bringing victory back from defeat.
The critical drinker reviewed the modern star treks and said the reason they are so different, so lacking in the crew showing each other respect etc is the writers have never done anything with their lives. They have lived comfortable lives and gone straight into writings Whereas the original Star Trek writers fought I the Korean wars. They knew the chain of command, they respected each other even if they didn’t like each other etc. Tolkien and CS Lewis were at Cambridge university together. But they also had both fought in the First World War. Lord of the Rings was written by Tolkien as a gift to the uk people as a Modern mythology. But it was him working out his experiences of war and PTSD. Frodo has PTSD at the end. That is why he cannot get back to living life like Sam can and be happy. He sees Sam get married and knows he never can because the wraith’s blade had gone into him and there is no recovery from that. So he goes with the elves. He goes to Heaven with them. He commits suicide and is received with love into Heaven with people who love and respect him. The same happened in the chronicles of narnia. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lord Roop had been stranded on the island of nightmares. CS Lewis again decided the only cure for PTSD was death. So the wizard put Lord Roop to sleep at Aslan’s Table where he would sleep until the end of time when Aslan would return and give new life to everyone. These scene are much deeper than people realise. The modern books are nowhere near as good because the writers have never done anything. They have had normal lives. Ernest Hemingway said you cannot sit down to write if you have not stood up to live. I can write about security businesses and reformed murderers and much more because I have experience of working with these things. I’ve had some crazy jobs and life experiences. I speak 5 languages, I have lived in other countries, I do different things even though I am working class and have little money. And so I can write authentically about these things. I will be integrating a lot of Celtic mythology into a future novel. I will have to read a lot but also go walking out in the wilds of Scotland and Ireland to get authentic experiences. I have just included a song that is perfect for the novel and I know that from the Irish singing group I go to. You have to live to write. Most people don’t realise this. And by “live” I mean the sorts of life on the edge, life by a thread experiences. But don’t deliberately put yourself in danger. That is just stoopid. But go and do crazy jobs, with the backup and framework of the job. Be around great workmates who have experience and a great sense of humour. Then you can write authentically.
Isn't a better/more comfortable life for the next generation a big part of what previous generations aimed to achieve? "because the writers have never done anything." is a supremely arrogant thing to say, based on a fairly arbitrary/subjective metric and can apply to more than just writers/authors. "Strive to live a full life, but live it sensibly." is good advice, sure, but shouldn't necessarily be an obstacle towards those folk with rich, creative minds who have yet to go through (and may _never_ go through) particular experiences. By the way, Critical D is a blatant right-wing reactionary. There's no question about where his motivation stems.
Books are often too preachy in regards to themes. I think authors are afraid that readers will take something out of the book that they weren’t intending. However, that just shows how deep and rich the story is when people can take different perspectives from the story depending on their life experiences, values, etc. When authors preach, it keeps the reader from intellectually engaging with the story to the same extent.
My friend, books have always been preachy. Careful not to fall into the easy trap of calling everything you disagree with political or preachy while overlooking everything else.
@@Dysfunctional_Reprint Some books are meant to be preachy, such as self-help books, current event books, and other non-fiction types. When I read those books, I expect and understand. However, that's not what I want from fiction, whether the author agrees with my world view or not. I'm quite capable of analyzing themes of books whether I agree with them or not.
people really dont care whether their book's theme was misunderstood as "oh, it was meant to be a gay message but its great it applied to your straight relationship", they moreso care when misunderstandings are "you must support this messed up thing because i couldnt infer that this plot point was included out of necessity rather than indulgence" lol in prior times, whether its to be directly blamed on social media prevalence or any combination of factors, authors didnt have to worry so much about what one person thought of their work. they were always going to be the largest authority to speak on their own work. now, social media figures can have more pull over a book's image than the author OR reader, and that's a little weird.
Great take. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur Clarke. To me, this means we don't fully understand "magic," and Brandon Sanderson basically writes science fiction when it comes to his powers. Nothing wrong with that! I think this is a cool blending of sci-fi and fantasy, which already have much in common in their attempts to explore human issues in a non-Earth setting. In my series, I'm trying to blend hard and soft in 2 ways: 1) our protagonist learns more about the magic as the books progresses (soft --> hard), and 2) the capabilities magic gives become less predictable and controllable as the books progress (hard --> soft).
I completely agree about the themes being hammered in with no room left for a reader to evaluate it through the process of their own self-discovery. It is hard to ignore when a book feels as if the author forgets the actual story they have been developing in favor of trying to hit home some social/political/economic view they hold. This is especially true in the middle grade and young adult books. (I read those a lot having 6 kids and many nieces and nephews). Children and teens, while often needing hand holding, are not stupid. I personally believe there is more growth for a child having picked up on the subtle cues and understanding them, than having someone say in not so many words "think this about this character and theme."
I would go so far as to question if the lack of fiction that makes them practice picking up those cues and considering lots of situations they don't encounter in their own life could be what is causing the lack of understanding of social subtleties.
18:30 - On the whole "not knowing how it works making magical characters feel more mystical and powerful" - Ambient magic from Tamora Pierce's _Circle_ universe is kind of like this from the other side. In the first quartet the kids are simply learning how to use their magic (and occasionally do something crazy by accident) and we learn the basic rules behind their soft magic, but by the second quartet they're all capable of Gandalf-level powerful acts, and because ambient magic isn't very well-known outsiders can't really tell how it works. Most magic in this setting is called academic magic, and works by traditional hard rules.
Dune is very subtle in warning against fake prophets and propaganda, more than half the people were still cheering for paul until we were literally told, at face that he is not the choosen one😂
I think the key lies in striking the right balance for the particular story an author is telling. There is a place for subtle themes and overt. One is not better than the other. One doesn't necessarily make better art then the other, they are just different kinds of art. We need both. Kind of like sometimes I just want to read a fluffy romance because in those moments it's what my soul needs, while at other times I need a book that tackles hard life issues. Both are art! Both have a place. We need classic-style fantasy to bring us into that place of wonder and we need modern styles to help us flesh out deep targeted themes. Each story calls for its own recipe in how it's presented to the reader. The point about trusting your reader is really important though. Ultimately I just hope we never stop seeing people writing from their hearts. Soulless OVERLY formulaic storytelling can be more of a wonder killer then overt themes.
A similar effect can be seen with books and movies that "take themselves too seriously", mistakes that are easy to forgive and disbelief that is easy to suspend in a fourth-wall-breaking comedy are harder to accept or ruin the whole thing in a dead serious work of fiction.
I thought you said the difference is in the "Onyx Flame". I was wracking my brain to think of the Onyx Flame in LOTR. Finally I heard you say it again and realized you said "the unexplained". Now we need someone to write a series based on The Onyx Flame!
Great video. Lately, I've been missing that older style of fantasy. Less of the "scientific" rules of magic, and more wonder. Worldbuilding only what's necessary for the story to come to life. More subtlety. I'm going to have to embark on an epic quest to find good books that fit that criteria written in the past five or so years. But...next week Tad William's latest book will be released, so I think I can put off the quest a _bit_ longer.
Yes, this. I think it has to do with the idea of "Lúthien sang a song of enchantment, and the Orcs fell asleep" instead of "Kaladin has only 3 Stormlight infused spheres left. He must ration out his next 3 moves." The latter doesn't fill me with wonderment, even though it's action-packed and exciting.
I don't think the problem is too much world building, but the wrong kind of world building. There is this idea of "hard magic" vs "soft magic," where hard magic has strict, well-defined rules that are told to the reader directly and in detail and work in a mechanical way, while soft magic is allowed to be magical instead of quasi-scientific. You have have deep lore and world-building, including about magic, without turning your fantasy story into sci-fi wearing a fake mustache. The problem is that the trend right now is towards hard magic, with many readers and authors falling into the idea that the harder the magic the better, and soft magic is bad and lazy. I put a lot of the blame on Brandon Sanderson and his third law, which states that the extent to which magic can solved problems in fiction is proportional to how much the reader understands it. I think the quote lacks nuance, and that a distinction should be made between how much readers understand the limitations of magic and what it can do, and how much the readers know about where it comes from, what it is, and how it works. I think it's possible to give the reader enough of an idea of what magic can and can't do, and what it's costs are, for the story to work without having to completely demystify it and ruin the wonder that should be at the heart of fantasy.
@@tauoniclightning6697 That's Sanderson's first law, and it doesn't actually say that. The law says that a fantasy author's ability to resolve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands that magic. The law actually says more or less what you want to say. It's not a prescription for hard magic systems nor is it a proposal for soft ones. It just means a writer's ability to convey how his or her magic works, directly affects how it can be used narratively.
"I wasn't tempted to use its power, but now I have eagles at my command. I think I'll put the ring on." Gandalf knows they'd be the world's biggest target. The bad guys have dragons.
This video is a fresh breath of air. I have been writing a fantasy novel, and I have been reviewing a lot of videos like this. Thankfully, my construct of everything that makes up my story, its plot, the characters origins etc; has complied with what readers want and crave. It is true. Not everyone wants so much detail. Sometimes less is more. Writers are the maestro to entertainment, and not everything needs to be known. Especially for fantasy.
You’re forgetting the elephant in the room. The reason Tolkien's books are superior is because they aren’t tainted by the misanthropic, nihilistic sarcasm that has its claws in modern philosophy: because Tolkien’s worldview (and we cannot escape an author’s religion impacting their work) engendered a far more meaningful undercurrent that tied everything together.
Clicked on the video because Im on book 3 of the Poppy War trilogy and really enjoying it. Theres so much good fantasy/fiction coming out. Worst thing we can do to aritsts/authors is try to set limits on what is good or bad. Breaking the mold is how the greats are made
The difference can be summarized in one item: different writters. All those differences happen because writters of today are both influenced by what already came before them, which already makes it so what they write can't be the same, and because we have a very high abundance of writers and opportunities for books and that makes it so what is "selected" is not the best you could find, however, at the same time there is a better chance for in the middle of it for real gems to appear that would otherwise be ignored because of the "standards" of the publishers. Also what @Eluarelon said, that these "classics" are a very small sample of what existed in that time and was popularized, so it doesn't actually represent a gold standard that was changed, or lost.
At the beginning of the video and the part about "leaving some things unexplained" I immediately thought about The Mirror Visitor series by Christelle Dabos. I think that it does it really well, and it's modern fantasy. You're enchanted, left imagining more. It's low fantasy, and far from perfect, but it definitely *feels* nostalgic! It has that ~old fantasy~ vibe. Recommend for anyone who likes low fantasy, mystery, and slow stories. By the end, it's really great imo.
I've actually been using this concept in my own writing, without even knowing it was a writing philosophy with a name and history. It's just something I naturally slipped into, because I wanted the environmental storytelling of my world to feel like the promotional artwork (+German game guide artwork) Katsuya Terada did for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Triforce of the Gods in Japan), and Link's Awakening, while also making a world as vast as that of One Piece & Avatar: The Last Airbender, or classics like Tolkien's Legendarium & Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Katsuya Terada's artwork just _captured_ me as a child, and the Zelda games A Link to the Past, Link's Awakening, and the Oracle duology had other key art by another artist that just added onto the feeling that Terada's artwork and the games' art direction and story gave me. It all gives off such a mystical vibe of adventure, freedom, and mystery. The attention to detail in every drawing makes everything feel like such a living, storied world; shrouded deep by darkness and decay. It's peak dark fantasy (without tipping too far into grimdark), and the exact kind of vibe I want to try to emulate with my writing now. I've also recently been reading the Twilight Princess manga, written and illustrated by Akira Himekawa. I'm not that far in yet, but the story additions and their artstyle are both already giving me that same sense of vastness, history, and ages long forgotten. I also have dozens of themes I want to express through my work, many of which interlink and relate to each other. A wide and storied world is what I feel is best to communicate all of it without being ham-fisted about it, so it all comes together nicely!
poppy war and tolkien are completely different, conveying different messages and telling completely different stories. now, i haven't watched the video yet, but using tolkien and the poppy war in the thumbnail is like comparing apples and oranges.
Kinda the point of the video. Way more nuanced, but yeah: "These days don't write books like Tolkien did back in the day" is pretty much the main point of that discussion.
@@brianbarrett6316 my point is that you can compare them one offers nothing to latch onto making it a very obnoxious read because none of the characters actions matter besides one and she does something every agrees is dumb and evil
Sorry, saying Samwise is only good is too simplistic. He do have some dubious attitudes that are usually overlooked. His treatment of Gollum is not exactly stellar.
Side note: the term Deus ex Machina comes from ancient Greek theatre. The word 'machina', literally machinery, was the name given to the ropes and pulleys etc above the stage from which angels were lowered etc. Most Greek dramas were about human frailty and how people mess up everything. The script would play out until close to the end when the whole situation looked hopelessly entangled. And then one of the gods would arrive from Olympus, lowered onto the stage from the machinery. The god would tell everybody to stand still and he/she would tell everyone what is now going to happen with each person to sort out the strife. Once the god sorted out the humans the play would end. 'God from the machinery' got taken into modern theatre for when an author writes in a too convenient solution.
As an “older” reader.. it’s been very difficult to explain the difference in the “feel” of books now, vs books I read as a kid/teen in the 80s&90s.. There IS a difference in just publishing in general these days that has a nearly tangible effect on books published in the days of the internet and the ‘death of the printed word’.. It seems that the environment that many authors are in today, the whole, ‘better have that sequel out within so many months’ or you lose your sliver of interest from the market.. ..it’s very different from the days of yore when waiting a year or more for the next book was just how it WAS.. There really isn’t a way that, except for the rare few, authors won’t feel pressured to put out product fast, but also, feel pressed to “distinguish” their world building from the pack.. 🤔 Also.. just a caveat from someone who grew up without a TV, thanks to a hippie parent, there also was no internet or anything else.. ..from a psychological and sociological perspective, the way people thought and “imagined” things, before there were millions of brilliantly colored images and media available, to draw from in their mind for imagery or inspiration, is just fundamentally DIFFERENT.. ..I’m in the perplexing position to have experienced the world before media dominance, and after.. and frankly, it’s weird.. ..the way my brain USED to ‘imagine’ 40 years ago, as a free range kid’s entertainment, was different than the way my imagination works now.. ..It’s virtually impossible to keep all the endless images of other people’s make believe creatures and worlds from intruding somewhere, somehow.. ..It seems to me, that the lens that we have experienced the world with, will always have a profound impact on how we write. There has been another “revolution” in society in the recent years. I don’t think people are the same anymore. The way they imagine and create must change as well.. Sorry to prattle 😅 ATB
Very well said! I sometimes feel modern fantasy moves too quickly because people’s attention spans are being reduced severely by consuming short form content. I can still sort of remember how I used to imagine things before watching a lot of TV and having unlimited access to the internet and it was indeed very different.
i had always tragically associated my dwindling imagination to dissociation, pot, just adult exhaustion, maybe a mix of all those and more. but, if others are noticing this kind of thing, that may be something to look at. i used to be a Maladaptive Daydreamer. my imagination couldnt stop, it would actively sweep my days away. i also preferred reading to entertain myself, if i wasnt just drawing whatever reading inspired me to draw. but now it's like... television static in my brain. i can try to visualize things but its so hard unless i'm, like, smoking and just in a really low-pressure environment. which doesnt happen much cuz i only get given a single day off at a time, so now weekend-long creative benders for me lolll
Samwise isn't 'pure good'-if he were, he would have shown Gollum pity and permitted him to touch Frodo ("pawing at his master") and, Tolkien wrote later, Gollum would have sincerely repented. Letter 246.
Grimdark has been around since the 80s. GoT didn't popularize it at all. The IPs of Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40K predate all of that by 10-15 years, and its literally the tagline from 40K - it didnt exist as a concept prior to that, and 40K gave birth to it. By definition, GOT doesn't share a lot of tropes with Grimdark beyond surface level capacity. Westeros isnt dystopian, its oligarchal with a constant theme of breaking the cycle of power and lineage - ala Johnson and Morcock. It's a reaction to Tolkein, but is not anti-Tolkien. It craves the light, and it's heroics, but positions it's characters as flawed along the opposite lines, and whom cannot achieve their ambition. GoT is a mixture of Low and Dark Fantasy, as opposed to something like LOTR which is heroic and high fantasy. These genres have been around for decades and are really the dividing line here. High Fantasy and Heroic Fantasy showcase the good triumphant over the forces of chaos, entropy, and decay while upholding traditional values systems of sacrifice, honor, faith, and protection. The armor of faith and the sword of truth. It's very humanist in that regard. Dark Fantasy inverts that. Showing chaos and entropy as natural cycles whereby even the most optimistic and hopeful eventually fall to their own ambition and desires. It has a more fatalistic and nihilistic outlook on its world. Where sacrifice is twisted into conservation at all cost. Where even a good king can become corrupt and the hero doesn't always win, or is sometimes not the shining knight. That's what Morcock did with Elric. He flipped Tolkein's tropes on their head, making Elric a narcissistic drug-addicted weakling, but was our protagonist. Grimdark and GoT may share some concepts, but it's Dark Fantasy at its core elements. Another in the tradition of Morcock rather than Warhammer 40K. I get that GoT is called out in wikis as being Grimdark, but between 40K and something like Elric, it aligns more with Morcock than it does the Black Library.
im laughing at myself with the way the first line of your comment confused me. i was about to leave your comment under yours until i continued reading. i was like "GoT?? Grimdark?? How can people possibly compare GoT with like... WH40K??" and then you brought it up xD
There is an award-winning fantasy book (I picked it up because of this) that starts off nearly immediately with "slavery bad", not even ten paragraphs in, and it was presented about that bluntly with pure exposition, rather than with a scene or a character interaction or anything regarding the setting. That was just the introduction, and there was no context presented. I put the book back on the shelf immediately. Everyone agrees slavery is bad, but one can do better than "Hey, by the way, reader..." I agreed with the message but hated the delivery, and dropped it already knowing I wasn't going to get immersed in the story. I would say on the whole writing has gotten lazier, and people lack subtlety or the ability to step outside of themselves anymore. Writing is, after all, quite a bit like acting. Tolkien was a war veteran who disdained conflict, but there was never a scene that went, "And then Bilbo looked into the camera with his new dwarven friends, and said 'Human conflict, especially mechanized warfare with machines and artillery, is a very terrible thing!'" If there had been, it's likely he wouldn't be as popular.
Great video! I completely agree that modern stories are more overt with their themes, especially so with tv shows and movies of the last several years. It often seems that the theme/message is more important than the story. People generally appreciate themes, but only if the story is good. Bob Iger even said that Disney got carried away, and needs to get back to story first, messaging second.
When it comes to film/TV, I have a strong intuition that the source of this issue is in too much studio committee involvement in production dictating a "widest possible net" approach, especially to fantasy adaptations. The studio and/or writing team have no trust in the audience's basic intelligence, and it shows in the over-explanatory, over-simplified plots and dialogue.
I think part of it is that modern fantasy is also a lot more character-focused than older work. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, but there's only so many times you can read about super assassins or wannabe-viking BAMFs before they feel like the same tired rendition from some other book you barely remember. I've noticed that with modern fantasy it's the character driven stories that focus on a very different kind of life that we don't typically see in Every Fantasy Book Ever that feels fresh and exciting - think Sword of Kaigen or Green Bone for example.
Yeah theres definitely something to that. I think it can lead to the protag adventure feeling mundane because we have a look into how they react to everything if that makes sense. Thlugh robin hobb pulls it off
Agreed. I lke character focused, but why are the characters all so much? Maybe the hero doesn't need to be an assassin secret princess vampire and can just be one thing?
I've found that magic systems are the death of themes. In many fantasy books the magic system basically replaces any theming. Instead of interesting commentary by the author we just get a bunch of rules and spells to worry about and that's it. The proliferation of magic systems has lead to stories based around magic systems, rather than stories based around themes. I can think of many books like this, Promise of Blood was my realization of this, and recently The Will of the Many, books with basically no themes and just magic. It's also lead to a simplification and misunderstanding of what themes even are, a mistake this video makes. Power, oppression and redemption are not themes, they're just subjects. They are what the story is about. Themes are arguments. They are statements made by the author to the reader through their characters, with each character offering a particular point of view or argument for or against that theme. Power is a subject; "Power corrupts" is a theme. Oppression is a subject; "Oppression turns the oppressed into oppressors" is a theme. Redemption is a subject; "No evil is beyond redemption" is a theme.
That is two ways to pass a message, one is two tell exactly as it is mutiple times until the person memorize the narrative. Two is to create logical way for the person to arrive at that conclusion by themselves. Modern writers cant do the second because often in their own lives the were teach what to think instead of how to think. And they afraid people wont arrive to the same conclusion as they.
Always felt like Robert Jackson Bennet and Bryan Staveley had an older fantasy feel despite being more modern authors. Divine Cities and Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne both had so much mysterious intrigue integrated into them!
Honestly, I have to disagree (at least somewhat) with the whole mystery-vs-explanation dichotomy. First off, I don't personally find that explanations inherently interfere with a sense of wonder at all; and thus don't generally accept the premise that mystery-and-wonder vs explanation are two mutually exclusive sides of whatever coin is in question. (One example that comes to mind of how they can coexist is the manga Hunter x Hunter; it has a highly-detailed hard-magic system used for all sorts of complex puzzle-like conflicts [and even frequently launches into lengthy info-dumps about all sorts of super specific rules and systems] yet still manages to constantly surprise the reader with an intense sense of wonder and awe at nearly every turn and in an _insane_ variety of ways). And don't forget, for all Tolkien's sense of wonder and mystery he wove into Middle Earth, he explained far more than most authors do (even more than many modern authors); he achieved his sense of mystery and wonder not by merely 'leaving things unexplained' but by careful, deliberate writing choices in how he presented and portrayed things, and when he explained them. A large part of this is that most of the POV characters (aka, the various Hobbits) don't ever understand things all the way (even if the reader might), and any sense of wonder lost through explanation and worldbuilding can be recaptured vicariously through them (consider how the "Mumakil" are vague, big, ominous fantasy beasts; but when Sam instead identifies an "Oliphaunt" and is in awe of what he's seeing; we, the audience, have actually just gotten the creature explained to us almost fully, yet the sense of wonder at it has actually increased, all because of the characters' perspective on things). It's also, I think, hugely underappreciated what a master of language Tolkien was. The guy was a scholar of linguistics, mythology, history, and poetry; when he wanted to create awe in the reader, it didn't matter whether they knew or understood the details and explanations of what he was talking about; it mattered _how_ he talked about it, how the crafting of epic and mythological words and images made the reader _feel_ what he wanted them to feel. I think this, even more than the hard-magic/worldbuilding stuff, is actually a major contributing factor to the shift in the sense of wonder in modern fantasy; the fact that modern writing often strives to be more invisible and less elaborate than the style of older works (I bet if you compared a well-explained, hard-magic series with poetic prose to a mysterious and left-to-the-imagination one told through simple 'beige' prose; the poetic one would still feel more 'classic fantasy' the majority of the time). As far as the themes stuff goes; I think probably the biggest contributor is, again, the stylistic tendencies of modern writing. I don't think writers actually think we need to be hit over the head with obvious messages (although publishers might generally think that we do, and push authors more in that direction); but I think the screen-writing-influenced meta of: {3 Act Structure + Conflict + Character Arc + "Cut out all the unnecessary stuff" + "Emphasize the climax as much as possible"}; which works great for making clear, compact, characters and plots; often struggles trying to fit themes into that same framework (but seems to be largely presented as the 'default' way to tell stories) without it being either too faint to say anything interesting about them, or too 'overt-message' to let the ideas sit with the reader in the way that often works best for themes (I think that films have learned how to take advantage of their medium to deliver a lot of the thematic work in visual/audio/acting/directing elements that novels mimicking the 3-act structure of films don't know how to make up for).
Nice to see the classics getting love and a deeper look at what is happening in fantasy. I can’t read this genre today- not that there aren’t some great ones out there, but I find the readers demand for (and publishers complicity w/) recognizable tropes and ‘backstory’, in place of creating say, atmosphere or clever themes or true emotional resonance….is pulling the writing into a dumbed down versions of what’s possible within the genre. It’s a cranky view, sure, but I’d rather be cranky and critical than bored! 😅
I recently re-watched Lord of the Rings and noticed that Gandalf isn't much of a wizard. He uses his staff to hit people and fights with a sword, but rarely is able to cast any magical spells. He is more of an old street bum that found a pointy hat and a walking stick. lol The fantasy I have enjoyed in the past is the older Dragonlance books. I wish they were still in print so I could get the whole set.
Projecting a magical force field that destroys a massive flaming sword. Channeling (divine?) lightning through a sword. Resisting a fireball. Uttering destruction into existence. Turning pinecones into fire grenades. Summoning an equine by whistling. Those are pretty stark displays of power.
Its not a fantasy per se, but The Hunger Games is an example of a great modern story that really resonates for me emotionally and intellectualy. It made me feel many emotions like the ending of Lord of the rings. This story also ends in a bittersweet way.
Did you watch Tale Foundry's video too? I do agree with the point, but I think you can still make it work as long as you know what you aim for. If you make a hard magic system you just have to know it's going to feel like a mix of sci-fi and fantasy, and the sense of wonder has to come from elsewhere. I have a habit of overexplaining irl though, so take it with a grain of salt if you will.
Also what has to be said, you need to know the uses, and strengths and weaknesses of systems. Hard magic systems are mostly useful for making up interesting solutions, basically treating it like science. That means it will be more enjoyable for eggheads, rather than daydreamers. Both preferences are valid, and I don't want hard magic systems to go away. But authors shouldn't force themselves to build one if it doesn't serve their style or vision, themes or setting, and whatever else.
There is one CRUCIAL thing that a lot of modern fantasy fails at is contrast. Start with a small, little start like lotr with the shire, and the ending will feel even more epic, sure, you can have a epic prologue first to set up the story but then quickly have a simple, humble start.
I would love a new fantasy series that focuses around a "Chosen One" character, with a perfect mix between Old School fantasy and Grim Dark fantasy. John Gwynne's The Faithful and The Fallen series comes damn close. Any other tips? ⚔
hope you read Philip Chase's Way of Edan then. If not, do yourself a favor and pick it up ASAP. I'd also recommend Guy Gavriel Kay (at least the early works, because I have no idea if the later stuff still hit that feel in the way Fionavar and Tigana did.
@@BobaFerd Hope you'll enjoy it. It takes on that Chosen One trope in a very interesting way, it's deeply rooted in old mythology similar to Tolkien and the more introspective parts feel very tolkienesque (in a very good way) to me in the way they provoke thoughts and make me feel. It's also pretty grim in parts, because there's a lot of war involved and Mr. Chase can get pretty descriptive in those scenes. Same thing with Guy Gavriel Kay, though he started writing back in the 80's so he probably should be included in the "Fantasy Classic" category. He used to work with Christopher Tolkien in editing Silmarillion and especially the Fionavar trilogy, by no means a simple copy, feels thematically very similar to Tolkien. More steeped in celtic and arthurian mythology it can also get pretty grim at times, and had a few scenes that would have probably made me DNF it if written by a lesser writer.
Not a book, but maybe a fun fact? 😆 Hi from Romania! I automatically started humming the most popular local folk-rock song when you started talking about the 'ubi sunt' motif. It makes up the whole chorus of "Amintire cu haiduci" by Valeriu Sterian (Memory of haiduks? I guess it could be translated that way). Of course, in romanian it would be "unde sunt" - not far off though, right? Haha. "Unde sunt pistoalele? Unde sunt pumnalele?" - "Where have the haiduks gone?" sort of thing. The chorus that everybody here knows and most are fond of: "Where are their guns? Where are their daggers? The haiduks' horses and rifles?" The motif must be one of the reasons it stayed popular for decades after the singer's death (in 2000). It's just that feeling!
I got tired of fantasy when the series became longer and longer… 6,8, 10 books with years of waiting between them. ”I’ll write until they nail my coffin shut” Yes, and then someone else is writing the end and it feels like crap. Or the author got lost in dussins of books addressing the before and around and never comes back to the original story. Or the books became a tv show and runs over both the story and its end and the author looses his interest. And as you said, profetias and heros and save the world for evil darks… after ten of those, you know them all… I do want to read fantasy again, but it’s hard to get a start. But for sure, I’ll never again start reading a series which isn’t finished….😂
Great channel and content. I enjoyed your take, and agree with you. I don’t like overt or heavy-handed themes or immoral messages. I like soft magic, mysterious and powerful, and unexplained. The lost cents of ancient history and secrets, all of those things do add to the appeal of LOTR. A lot of the older books did feel too wordy and slow, but the modern push to have a shorter and faster paced story also seems like it might miss some thing. I feel like a book can achieve the right balance. Don’t have an example of one though.😊
Re politics in Fantasy (or any other Genre of Fiction) i think it is the other way around and puting ideologidal statements in there is the escapism, because this allows the writer to avoid reality and all its problems (like: your favorite policy has allready been tried and failed, catastrophicall, multiple times)
The examples of "modern" fantasy that you flash on the screen at 23:08 actually contains a lot of CLASSIC fantasy (and not Modern Fantasy of the last 20 years )- Wheel of Time, Shannara, Wizard of Earthsea, Song of Ice and Fire, Deed of Paksenarrion, Discworld, Memory, Sorrow and Thorne, Eye of the World, etc...
I wonder how much of the difference can be ascribed to the different life experiences of "classic" vs modern fantasy writers. Tolkien, for example, was heavily influenced by having served in World War I (and lived through World War II) and by being immersed in old literature and languages and mythology, and not in the modern media that today's writers grew up with.
I am a semi intelligent human being. Authors who bash people over the head with political themes bore me. Mostly because their thesis only survives in a fantasy universe that they have dictatorial control over. I have found that authors who want to propagate a belief to readers are often incapable of examining their themes and ideas in challenging ways that represent multiple side or aspects of an issue. As you said in the video, too often, we are told what to think and are not allowed to arrive at a conclusion by thorough examination of the positive and negative aspects of an issue.
What about issues that have no positive aspects? I am writing about such issues. What is good in human child sacrifice? Or what is "positive aspect" of child molesting? There are none, so there won't be and should't be any examination of "the positive [...] aspects of an issue".
That can be said of any themes though, political or not. I sometimes find allegory really alluring, even if I don’t agree with the themes it’s purveying. Narnia and Harry Potter would be very different stories had they not been Christian allegories. Star Wars would’ve been very different had they not been political allegories.
@@theq6797 Yes plus the "semi intelligent human" was interesting! Political satire can be done well, when it's blunt/unsubtle in its metaphors (narrative devices).
We need more stuff like Willow and works with the power myth gave us/, even ones which depart from the Tolkien and English model. Greek, Roman, Norse, Chinese all have real myths and power to them.
When Theoden is donning his armor before the final stand at Helm’s Deep and recites the “Where is the horse and its rider?” poem … the what-if visions of Arwen and Elrond about her outliving Aragorn …
6:44 .. when you’re telling someone a story, there’s a substantial difference between creating a mystery, that they are interested in pursuing further.. and Telling a story that feels kinda flat, kinda unfinished, because there’s nothing much there TO be curious about.. 😊
I love this video. Agree with much you said. I love modern fantasy, but the feeling you described in the beginning (with lotr/hp/star wars) is the same for me. I sometimes blame it on nostalgia, and I don't think your points in this video can explain everything, but there is something there for sure. Or we just have to wait 20-30 years for the next big thing with as much impact as those things had.
A book written 100 to 20 years ago, will naturally feel different from a book written in the last 20 years, just because the world events that impacted those writers are different from the world events that impacting modern writers. Your own experiences obviously also change your understanding, so while teenage you might struggle to understand a character's motivations, or find something mysterious, 40 year old you won't.
As a writer, i want to interject where you have noticed modern fantasy is getting shorter and shorter. The reason for this is because authors are forced to write within specific word counts to be published. Our work isn’t even considered if we don’t fit into that category of word count. It’s incredibly disheartening as a writer trying to fit within those requirements. Trust me, we’d love the opportunity to expand and explore and I’ve read some amazing stories by amazing authors that know once their manuscripts have to be sent off to agents they’ll need to shorten and cut many parts of the manuscript
Most modern entertainment has become a hammer with which to bash the enjoyer over the head with a message now - it's why I hate it. Present me with arguments and situations and let me come to my own conclusions.
Compelling and provoking discussion. Attempting to walk the line myself between writing a great story injected with Christian themes and do it in a subtle yet exciting ways.
Remember though, media literacy is low now and critical thinking skills are lower, these new authors pumping out these books are also young and I feel like the AUTHOR quality has dropped as well as the reader quality.
I'm writing a novel, and I’ve thought about this a lot. Back in the day, authors relied on raw imagination and weren’t as focused on logic or consistency - maybe because they didn’t care as much, or simply weren’t as analytical. Their stories, full of wonder and adventure, were perfect for kids who didn’t need everything to make sense. Modern authors, though, are more logical and have access to endless resources that emphasize detailed worldbuilding and coherence. Modern audience got more sophisticated as well. I mean 20-40 years ago, how many readers/viewers even knew things like: character motivation, arcs, tropes, comic relief sidekick, complex characters with flaws, etc? While this makes stories smarter, it can sometimes strip away that wild, imaginative spark which made older fantasy so magical. So modern books are much better pieces of literature, but not necessarily something that can captivate our minds. Is there a way to balance both?
The struggle i have with making the themes to obvious and not trusting the reader is that i wholeheartedly agree with you on how powerful subtlety can be, but then i look at how the Star Wars fandom is filled with people who'd happily work for the Empire because they completely missed the themes and messages of the story and now complain that is getting "too political" for having more than two women talk to each other. Can we really say we should trust the reader/viewer when this is the result? I do not blame younger writers for seeing this and going "actually, I don't want to leave any room for people to misinterpret my work"
A constraint on size might be something rather mundane, called... the price of paper. Digital books mitigate it a bit, but many authors (at least in Brazil) find themselves pressured not to write thousand-page bricks due to thick books being too expensive for most people. Many indie writers I know rely on crowdfunding because otherwise, small publishing houses (not the big players in the market) can't tank the cost of printing books few people can afford.
I got a similar feeling when playing Dragon Age: Origins. I was choking up a bit when the final march to Denerim began. I never got the same feeling from any of the other games in the series. There was a mix of dread, hope, pride, and excitement for the battle to come that satisfied an itch I was never able to scratch again in DA2 or Inquisition.
I think a recent series that nailed it was The Stormlight Archives. That and the mistborn series. Both were absolutely fantastic reads from Brandon Sanderson.
I realize I'm in the minority, but I think so many modern fantasy tales double-down on being really explicit, either in sex or profanity. Tolkien's works had neither, and had an air that leaned more towards the goofy than the gritty. I think that billing willing to be silly or lighthearted makes something more sincere, and as such truer to itself.
Did you enjoy this video? Check out my most recent commentary video here:
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I hate Tolkien
I think it's mostly a matter of perspective. What often gets forgotten is that if we're talking about fantasy classics we're only talking about a very small sample of what was out there at the time. Namely the small part that got popular enough to still be talked about in 2024. The thing is, back then there was an awful lot of fantasy out there noone seems to remember and most of that stuff wasn't up to par in quality with the greats of the genre. And in that respect, not much has changed and the number of fantasy books that are really outstanding in quality is still very small.
Comparing modern stuff to Tolkien also seems kinda unfair to me, because there's a reason for the huge impact those books had and it's really hard to duplicate that feat. This said, there's still quite a few modern authors that have the same kind of impact on me Tolkien had back then and that fill me with the same kind of wonder and mystery he did. The amount of really good stuff might even be bigger than it was back then, and there might be a reason why you kept going back to Tolkien and Hobb that much. Because even in their time, those two were/are the exception, not the norm.
Thank you for posting this out because that mindset is everywhere. Nostalgia goggles always ignore the mass of mediocre.
People forget that Sturgeon’s Law has always existed.
Even if we end up with a bias toward remembering only the best works of the past, it is still useful to understand the different ways in which works, both high and low quality, manifest differently in different times. Living on a media diet of only one era often means adopting the critical blindness of that era, and if we think that this blindness is only a thing of the past, then we'll be in for a big surprise when our critical outlook is also seen as "outdated."
Too reasonable for an internet comment.
90s fantasy novel fare was imo much better than today. You have a few standouts today but I remember going to the book store as a kid and what was on offer. It's like, one standard deviation on average below that.
As a teacher, I think that a lot of authors don’t realize that making their theme clear is not the same thing as making their themes convincing. The advantage of the storytelling medium is that it can lead the readers to drawing the conclusion you want them to conclude. You interrupt that possibility by telling them outright what to think. Readers who already agree with you will find it, convincing, of course, a readers who do not already agree with you will recognize that the opinion on the page is not their own, but rather the author’s. At the end of the day, writing is a skill, and not all authors are equally masterful in it.
Very well said!
“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history - true or feigned- with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
The Lord of the Rings - Foreword to the Second Edition (October, 1966)
IIRC there's a scene in one of the Ice Age movies where a character tries to tell Peaches, Manny's daughter, to do something, which she refuses. Manny then simply explains the situation to Peaches and imply how it is in her interest to do something which aligns with what the previous character told her, which cause Peaches to want to do that thing. Manny then explains that Peaches is more likely to do something if she thinks she came up with the idea.
@@ArifRWinandar Therefore, Ice Age is just Inception but with mammoths.
One thing i hate is how unimmersive some modern fantasy is
In game of thrones characters talked like people who are a part of the world and people looked like where they came from, so northen people have black hair and white, dornish people have brown skin and curly hair
It may sound silly to people but i just like it when fantasy is more grounded and immersive like this, and they don't talk like college students or look like a multicultural convention but they all somehow come from the same place
I’ve tried to explain this to people before but they want to call me a racist or what I’m saying racist so badly that they can’t hear my point. It’s not that I mind an inclusive setting. I just want the setting to feel real. If you have some small farming town in the middle of a Western European like setting (Wheel of Time) then why does it have the diversity of a California suburb and in roughly the same proportions? (the TV series). I’m not saying you can’t do it, but it does need some rationale because people in ancient times didn’t distribute like that. Fucking Brigerton pulled if off with just a few lines of dialogue that explained their more enlightened England, but Wheel of TV just did it because of whatever and it felt forced and fake.
Again, I’m not saying don’t be inclusive or don’t have a diverse cast. Just find a way to make it make sense.
My wife was like “so you wouldn’t mind an all black cast?” No. I wouldn’t. The Broken Earth Trilogy should have an all black or at least all non-white cast because that is how the world was defined in the books. And it’s one of the best fantasy series I’ve ever read. Wild Seed (which should absolutely be made into a film or series) would have a diverse cast and for good reason.
But yeah, I agree. The world has to feel real. Disregarding that shows an incredible lack of respect for the source material.
@@stillmattwest So for you the issue isn't with the brown people existing in stories set in fantasy worlds when the climate is like western europe. It's writers failing to add dialogue along the lines of "these people are brown because of x", and therefore not lining up with your knowledge of "ancient people" in the real world. Well if an explanation is all you need to make a setting feel real, then for WoT I can sort that in one sentence. "WoT is set in the distant future as well as the distant past." Problem solved.
For other media, the next time seeing a non-white person makes the setting feel unreal, do this. Imagine the non-white people are non-white because a magic rock fell in a stream, then their ancestors drank varying amounts of that water and one of the side effects was their children not being white. Future problems solved.
If you require an explanation if some of the people in a fantasy world are brown, but you don't need it explained when some of the people are human and some of them aren't or when a dragon can fly, then despite your claim of not minding an inclusive setting, I think you do. And I can see why people want to call you racist.
@@stillmattwest I'ts especially bad in Wheel of Times because in the books people all the time point out how Rand looks like an Aiel rather than coming from the village where he grew up. Having him stick out is a vital plot element.
I've been railing against this in modern fantasy for some time now. Fantasy cities, towns, and villages shouldn't be as ethnically and racially diverse as downtown New York or LA without some logical in world reason for it - and even then, it should be cause some fairly major problems.
The Netflix adaptation of the Witcher is a great example of why this trend is so terrible. The Witcher relies on heavy themes of alienation, fear of the other, and found family, but by filling both the main cast and background actors with modern tokenism the Netflix adaptation directly undermines the themes of the work. It's difficult to buy the (somewhat justified) fear and bigotry of the Witcher's world when every blip of civilization appears to exist in some sort of post-racial fever dream.
This doesn't just apply when the themes call for it either. Seeing ten different groups of disparate peoples living, conflict free, in places where it doesn't make any sense absolutely craters the general logic and believability of a setting.
@ I think you should stop deluding yourself and just admit you don’t like it when a cast isn’t all white. Consider how much “railing” you do when there’s no “logical in world reason” for the existence of that dragon or that magic ring. Then think about how upset you are when an actor is not white.
about the "modern books aren't subtle" thing, i get it and i do prefer subtler stuff, but at the same time, media literacy is at an all time low, I've seen way too many people misrepresent/miss the point on things that are so obvious that i can't really blame authors for not wanting to be misunderstood, especially since "death of the author" is the popular mindset these days.
This, I think, is a huge part of it. The internet changes how information spreads, and getting taken out of context is easy - and one bad misinterpretation, by someone with a platform can cause a lot of heat to the author. I had a couple authors comment to me in relationship to my video that this was actually a concern for them. I don't blame people for not wanting to be misunderstood. When people misunderstand me in my video I feel frustrated! Not an easy problem to solve.
@@Bookborn i agree. so i guess in a way this is just one of those problems that are made worse because of social media, lol.
I came to make this comment. I also think some of it is newer authors who don't know how to soft hand thematic elements, though I think your point is significantly more common
An author shouldn't worry about people misrepresenting or 'missing the point' of their books.
@@Arkantos117 they *shouldn't*, but that's much easier said than done. I would've said it was no big deal and I wouldn't care until I started experiencing piles-on on the internet. Now I understand it's more complicated, and I don't even have that large of an audience comparatively.
As a university lecturer I can say that what seems obvious to me in narratives is completely missed by my students. It seems like the US is losing its critical reading/viewing skills in younger generations overall because we are not teaching them to read long form works and be able to understand how things like themes, metaphor, and symbolism are used over the course of a narrative. They need to notice things and recall them later to get something like foreshadowing or symbolism. But if we don’t teach these things and kids don’t read, how will they know that is a thing? Even in film, which is what I teach, students rarely are paying attention to what they’re watching to the degree that I do and so miss the subtle unspoken things, and even spoken things, that give them exposition or that symbolize rather than literally stating a thing. The show don’t tell. But they have to tell because they don’t get it if they are just shown. So I end up having to spell it out for them pointing out “hey you remember how it showed us this? That was to let you know this.” Then they’re all like “oh!” If people are not paying attention or have the attention span for long form narrative (this includes TV eps, films, novels, even podcast episodes) then can you really be surprised that authors and filmmakers have to be more overt in their themes? It’s annoying for those of us who know how stories work but necessary for those who don’t to have a chance to get it. And even then they still might not because they’re not paying attention. 😑
This is very insightful and a scary trend! Thanks for commenting.
I absolutely notice this with my younger cousins. There's almost zero comprehension of subtlety or nuance which is so baffling to me. They cannot follow a plot line and their limited vocabulary is very disappointing. I try to get them enthusiastic about books or a specific movie but sometimes it's like talking to a wall. It makes me want to cry. :( I could not imagine having to teach and see the brain rot on a daily basis.
At the same time, it’s not fair to dumb stuff down for others though. Artists shouldn’t have force points, they should have the freedom to have the subtlety.
This is such a sad, yet insightful observation you've shared. It's a shame--my instinct is to suggest that we need more challenging artwork, not less, to encourage growth and to build up their comprehension skills. Yet I also understand the desire to run away from challenging media when the whole point of art is, at least partly, to be entertainment. What young person is going to be entertained by something they can't understand?
I wish there was an easier way to inspire them to enjoy challenging themselves with their media, but how do you convince someone who is used to only eating junk food that a salad could be delicious, too?
I have to question how universal or long term this is.
Public schooling is less than 200 years old, majority adult basic literacy is only 100 years old at best (my family has records from that time where some of them signed with x's because they couldnt write their own name)
I'm honestly sceptical that we're not simply seeing the result of most the populace having basic literacy, so can theoritically access literature and media but dont have much in the way of long term support from advanced literate family members or infrastructure that can teach that.
I reckon its going to ebb and flow, although pop culture or folk culture or low culture etc etc has always been seen as vulgar, uncultured and stupid (when simply lacking learning time in an appropriate environment is still common)
There's a quote I can't find, but it goes something like - "the best books you'll ever read will be the ones you read between the ages of fourteen and sixteen." I think the age might be a bit low, but it's a profound truth. The first time we're exposed to an idea, we find it amazing and deep and clever. The fortieth time, we find it boring and obvious and derivative. We can still find great enjoyment from fiction as adults, but we can't get that sense of wonder back. It's like how people will swear that the best music ever released was during their university years. Sometimes, we just miss the person we were when we first encountered it.
I find that to be untrue. I can read Shakespeare or the Epic of Gilgamesh today, at the age of 41 (I'd never read A Midsummer Night's Dream or Gilgamesh before) and I get the exact same kind of wonder I had for LOTR when I read those books when I was 15. I don't get the same from most modern fantasy books (A number of Brandon Sanderson's works-some-not most; and ASOIAF being the main exceptions). I get the same wonder from Earthsea. But I don't for the likes of Malazan for the most part, or for the First Law books, or the much lauded Rothfuss series, for example. I loved all these latter ones as well, even more than I loved Sanderson's stuff, but they don't hit the same for some reason. It has to do with the themes, the way wonder and magic is being conveyed, the characters, the journeys taken, than anything having to do with age, I think.
@@Ψυχήμίασμα I would guess it's more of a first love situation... the first time you read fantasy is going to have an impact on you that you can't reproduce by going back to the same well. You can still experience it multiple times, but not from that same source.
Unfortunately our brains seem wired to keep looking for it in the same place we found it last time, which is the only place it can never be found again.
I've felt it the first time I read fantasy, the first time I played a JRPG, the first time I played an MMO, the first time I learned a new language, etc. Often it seems you also only realize it in retrospect.
@@cristianhakansson7443 But I still have that same wonder whenever I reread LOTR. And I also do for stuff like The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, which is something I'd only discovered in my 30s. That series is completely different from typical high fantasy. With totally different themes. My thesis is the opposite. Sure, there might be some kind of "childhood exposure effect" but I don't think that's what this video is talking about or what I am trying to convey. My analysis is that post the 2000s, writing in fantasy has both thematically and stylistically shifted. Many are great fantasy works, contain very profound themes, don't get me wrong, but they are no longer going for the classical sense of folklore and myth that older works did. The feel, the sensibilities, the prose, the very language, is changed. I feel like many modern fantasy feels mundane. they don't transport me to another time and place, even though on the page the characters aren't on 21st Century Earth. I would draw an analogy to art. Modern fantasy feels like photography sometimes, or Stuckism, lol, but classical fantasy feels like I'm looking at pre-Raphaelite paintings.
I was in that age when I read LOTR, but much older when I read Dune.
I still remember the first time I read a book where the PoV character changed every other chapter. It blew my mind when I noticed that it was happening.
"Hard magic system" is magic adapted to the modern, science-oriented mind. We need to know exactly how it works, its rules, equations and what we can do with it. It has become like gravity.
Magic like gravity isn't magic. It is just an alternate universe with a different system of physics.
@@PierzStyx Science Fantasy is also a genre and while it has a different feel than hard magic systems they do share commonalities. After all, people who think magic is mystical is from lack of understanding. The unknown as you will. It's a play of perceptions and reality.
I don't think it's "science-oriented". Science is all about uncovering mysteries. If you don't have mysteries, you can't have science. So there is something post-scientific about world with no mysteries.
I actually hate most of that, I want magic to be as strange to understand as life. There are some I do like but most take away existement from the story
and you think magicians wouldn't want to know how their powers work? the scientists want to know how the world works?even historical "wizards" studied how their craft worked, is why we got all those ancient scripts detailing how they thought, like the keys of solomon
My problem with hard magic systems is that they often feel like some kind of separate extra physics. In myths and legends, the laws of nature themselves are fuzzy and ill-understood, and magic is just part of them. Imagine making things like bronze, or steel, or even just beer or cheese, without knowing anything about solid state physics or chemistry or microbiology. That was people’s reality for thousands of years. If a famed blacksmith figured out a special quenching technique to harden his swords, that might seem just as “magical” as a spell. With a hard magic system, you are introducing a division between magic and the rest of nature (which ostensibly follows our known laws of physics). It can be great in its own right, but care must be taken in terms of consistency within itself and the world around it.
Great point, its a problem that compounds whenever there are unkown rules to the magic system the heroes will learn before the final battle, because you cannot really discover those rules by experimentation of natural phenomena
One of the series with the best hard magic system i have ever seen is Reverend Insanity, where everything can be turned into magic if taken far enough, and as such magic is always evolving and everybody has to either adapt to the times or go even deeper into their own magic
Cooking could become magic, singing could become magic, lifting weights became magic, even personal experiences could be turned into magic if you lived with enough intensity
Those make for some truly epic moments, when a guy persevered so hard it became magic, someone loved so hard it became magic, someone took care of others so hard it became magic, someone killed so hard it became magic, its just badass
The thing is “they did know” about chemistry or biology as it applied to their world, as they did about witchcraft and magic.
They also had a “language” and a “process” - just not in modern terms.
In modern writing, authors often make the mistake of explaining to is in “modern” terms, not “world” terms
You've eloquently put into words what I've been trying to say for years.
"Hard" fantasy just feels like sci-fi with a LotR skin stretched over it.
Not a bad thing, per se, but I don't go to the pizzeria to eat great tacos, if you catch my drift.
Example of what I mean: “For this is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem also to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy.” - Galadriel to Sam in Fellowship of the Ring, talking about the mirror.
I personally love hard magic systems as long as they are thematic important. Yeah, soft magic systems or traditional fantasy provide wonder, but in certain moments, they can feel like deus ex machinas. Hard magic system only proposes that if you are going to add this variable that doesnt exist in the real world, it should make or have inner logic. Randomness can even function as innner logic as long as you intented it that way. I get that in some stories, can feel like an added level of physics, but I still think hard magic system stories have the potential to be better than their counterpart when they relate to the themes of the story.
Avatar The Last Airbender is a great example. The ussage of the elements is related to the character arcs of the main characters and antagonist. Even some aspects of traditional fantasy like the One Ring of Lord of Rings are hard magic and thus, their rules are well stablished but also challenge our protagonist believes.
I’ve never understood the so-called "Tolkien fatigue." Speaking from my own experience-and I admit I haven’t read all the classic fantasy books-it seems to me that most fantasy authors are fully realized creators in their own right. I’ve read works by Ursula Le Guin, Michael Moorcock, Robert Howard, Terry Pratchett, Glen Cook, Gene Wolfe, Roger Zelazny, Peter S. Beagle and others. None of them gave me the impression of being 'just as Tolkien, nothing new'.
The only series that came close might be The Wheel of Time, but even that feels more like a tribute to classic tropes than a mere imitation of The Lord of the Rings. So, I honestly don’t understand what people are reading if they think fantasy has been dominated by Tolkien knock-offs. Also, 'generic fantasy' in my understanding is something more DnD or WoW style, not Tolkien style.
Well said!
The reality is writers can't make a living pouring their mind and soul into a single world like Tolkien did. He spent decades building his world, languages, cultures... modern writers, unless already retired, can't afford to take that long. Professional writers have like a two year cycle between releases, sometimes less.
Strict deadlines for professional writers isn't modern. For the last couple centuries professional writers often made their living publishing serials in newspapers with strict deadlines. The best serials were collected into published novels. The best novels were reprinted, translated, and remembered.
When paperbacks first came out, new popular fiction authors could be published cheaply as 'dime store novels.' The most popular authors were given better quality publications, translations, and remembered.
It's not the publishers that have drastically changed, it's the readers. We no longer allow for a 'test run' on new authors. Periodicals are nearly dead. First editions must be printed on expensive, acid free paper. Outside of self publishing -which is cheaper and more competitive than ever- there's no way to vet a new author's potential popularity before making the heavy investment of a quality printing.
Needing some security before investing has pushed major publishing companies into the same spiral as the film industry. They look at what's popular, try to guess what made that popular, come up with a model, find something new that fits the model, and push this new thing. The new thing is successful because it was heavily marketed, the model is reinforced, the quality of the final product drops.
i'm considering working on my magnum opus for as long as i like in my free time and setting myself official work hours in which i churn out works that are on trend under a pen name to get around this problem - essentially to churn out trash until i can afford to self publish something i am actually proud of. that is if i take writing seriously as a career path....
Tolkien didn’t even do it for Money… because the Money only came after he was gone. He did it because he wanted too.
Tolkien wasnt a professional writer: he was a prefosser at Oxford, and then retired and usually wrote as a hobby.
A lot of old classic writers either had a steady day life, or came from money, the idea of a starving artist has always been out of touch because you often have to be well to do to go into the arts at all.
If anything it used to be much worse
@@PeoplePleaser578 That supports what I'm saying: you gotta do it for the love of the game if you want to create something that in depth/detailed.
For me another thing that makes LOTR so timeless is language. It´s written in a way that I feel like the story I´m reading is really part of the world it takes place in. The world feels like it has thousands of years of history and stories and Tolkien´s language blends in very well. Nothing feels out of place.
And what makes it so good in my opinion is the universality of the topics. It´s a story of good and evil, fear and valor, friendship and love, loyalty and betrayal, life and death, and it shows that even the smallest among us can make a difference. These are universal topics everyone can relate to and they touch our hearts in a special way. Sam talks to Frodo about the great stories they grew up with, the stories that meant something, and Tolkien manages to make their story feel like one of these great stories that outlast time. Like in a thousand years every child in Middle Earth will know the story of the fellowship.
There's perhaps a bit of irony in the fact that this discussion happens at such a rapid pace with so many in-your-face editing elements. I recognize that's the style of video that UA-cam seems to prefer, but that might be an instructive parallel.
i was gonna comment something about how the speech in the video almost seemed to bombard me. like, leaving a second of air between a sentence can really help people remember what you just said, but i think tiktok has really trained people to detest dead air in content. sucks.
I hate that I have to keep saying this, and I know I'm shouting into a very deep and dark well, but fantasy in the 80s and 90s was not all Tolkien clones. I'm not saying some authors didnt directly copy Tolkien (Terry Brooks and David Eddings, for example), but the deconstruction started as soon as LOTR was published. Even the Wheel of Time, which people incorrectly refer to as "classic fantasy," is a deconstruction of hero myths. The part that really cracks me up is that authors like R.F. Kuang go around acting like the last thirty years NEVER HAPPENED. As if ASOIAF didn't make all the points; as if fantasy is still about chosen ones and prophecies and all the books are based on medieval Europe. That's nonsense. But when they keep saying it, literary agents believe it. Everyone has a totally warped perception of the genre, despite the changes they've successfully made. Fantasy wasn't even like that in the 80s. I was there! So to answer your question, yes fantasy has lost its soul because a lot of writers, agents, and editors haven't done their homework.
Yup. Even before that too. Elric, Conan, Black Company, Book of the New Sun, Dragonriders of Pern, Thomas Covenant, Chronicles of Amber, Gormenghast, and hundreds more. Even the 'Tolkien clones' aren't as generic as people make them out to be. Belgariad, Shanarra, Riftwar, Wheel of Time, Dragonlance, etc all form their own unique identities in spite of their familiar beginnings.
@nightmarishcompositions4536 Yeah, I mean i wasn't even thinking of all those! 😄
Conan was just as much a force in the eighties as Tolkien was. Look at all the Conan clones. Even when there are superficial similarities, it doesn't mean Tolkien gets the credit. It's a stretch to say Dragonslayer or Krull were Tolkien clones. Because they have wizards? Tolkien didn't invent wizards, elves, or short people. He was part of a genre.
Interesting that I always hear about Tolkien clones from people born after 1990.
@ I was actually born in 1995 myself but I’ve always really enjoyed finding classic fantasy and horror stuff to read (:
Yeah.
A lot of Diana Wynne Jones' books were written before the 90's. And they are not at all Tolkien clones, not a single one of her books that I have read.
And I have read most of her library.
"The Dalmark Quartet" is the only series of hers that could be considered somewhat similar. But it is not really.
Sadly, she is massively underrated, and rarely gets brought up in discussions, about fantasy novels.
Maybe it is because her books are a bit weird?
@Cattensu All it takes is finding a good used book store and browsing the covers. Even if you weren't alive at the time (like I was) all it takes is not believing the hype.
Disclaimer: I LOVE hard magic systems, I prefer them to soft magic systems the majority of the time. That being said...
As a big time Mistborn fan, your first point on the balance of revealed powers vs withholding information is exactly why I like that trilogy so much. The final fight in book 1 is obviously a great moment that feels very "classic fantasy" to me, with the mist surrounding Vin and untold power swelling into her, giving her the strength she needs. It's an awesome scene, but it also comes across as more of a soft magic system. Fine by me, I grew up reading soft magic systems in YA fantasy for years. I had very little clue that anything different existed, hard magic wasn't even a phrase I had heard before. It wasn't until reading book 3 that my mind was truly blown. The fact that Brandon planned out a single, very specific reason as to why the mists could only surround Vin in that one moment blew my mind. It felt like some kind of awakening; this realization that cool moments in books didn't have to happen simply because the story demanded them.
I think later series I have read by Brandon (along with other authors) have lacked some of that mystery and wonder. He almost explains things too quickly now, with much of the plot of his recent books feeling like some type of magical science fair project (I'm talking recent Stormlight entries along with his Cosmere based Secret Project books, only Yumi and the Nightmare painter left me feeling awe in regard to the magic). In a perfect world I would like to see more of that mystery return. I hope there are reasons that the magic works the way it does, but I hope authors aren't in a rush to reveal those reasons to us too hastily.
I agree with you on being hand feed all the information.
There's a big difference between leading people to the message of your novel through subtle hints and the way people/animals and culture interact with the environment, and then just being talked at.
I agree with that, but I disagree when he says LoTR is subtle in its messaging...
Especially, regarding the good vs evil and friendship part... It's pretty heavy handed... Sauron is constantly called evil and corruption literally makes people old and ugly...
@@miss1of2 Sauron was the handsomest being for millenia, hell his beauty was one of the reasons why the Numenoreans and the Eriador elfs fell. Being white and black doesn' mean it isn't subtle. Even the queenly Galadriel and the princely Boromir are tempted be the power to protect they people,
One result of a heavy focus on world-building seems to me that many authors feel like they need to STUFF all that into the book explicitly. I like it best when the author has clearly thought out a fully realised and consistent world history and magic system, but does not feel the need to share every last detail in the book. When they've got it all figured out, but don't weigh the narrative down with the details, the storytelling feels more natural, the reader still has a sense of wonder over the mysteries, and yet you don't have sudden shifts in rules because the author is working within their world consistently.
As a college student, I somehow appreciate that modern fantasy books are smaller sagas and because of that, the pace isn't as slow as it was back then. What I mean is that as someone who loves to read but doesn't have the time to get involved in a larger saga, it's refreshing to find books that I can dive into and that don't take up so much time. While I know that quality over quantity is always a point to consider when reading, there are good modern fantasy books out there that while short, handle their world well, even if they have to opt to clarify things for you because they don't have the advantage of having hundreds of parts to break this information down into. I also feel that it's important to keep in mind that these are different times and it's not bad that the way of doing fantasy changes with them and adapts to people's lifestyles. Maybe the video is referring to bland fantasy that you see a lot on Book tok, but it's still a bit unfair to say that all modern fantasy is worse than ancient fantasy without touching on the point of the context we currently live in.
Great explanation of the ubi sunt theme, Johan! My feeling is that a lot of the preferences you find in modern fantasy, such as less description and less room for thematic development, are a result of people’s expectations for storytelling being heavily influenced by stories on screens. An example: As much as I enjoy Jackson’s LOTR films, they actually are much faster-paced than the books and lose a great deal of the reverence (though not all of it) that is derived from the “slower” moments in the books. And yet, many people growing up on fantasy today express a strong preference for the films over the books.
Thank you for teaching me about ubi sunt! I can definitely imagine that people's expectations are having a significant impact on modern-day storytelling.
That’s the impression I got from reading old fantasy and new fantasy. Reading Robert E Howard’s Kull, the action scenes are very descriptive and detailed. It’s not necessarily fast paced, but it’s immersive
And then looking at Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, that although it has an interesting world, it’s not as well detailed with its metaphors and writing when you compare to a writer like Gene Wolfe.
Then you get Robert Jordan describing every button on every coat on every person in every room and every plate of food they eat for aaaages. There’s such a thing as too much description.
And lack of metaphor doesn’t mean lack of subtext. Mistborn has a history and mysticism going back a thousand years just in its plot, refers to plots and events in a system which spans layers of reality, has a spiritual history going back millions of years to a history and origin that is still steeped in mystery (Who or what was Adonalsium, what are the shards shards of, layered of thought and metaphor as plains with physicality being only one layer of reality, who or what is Hoid, has causes and effects in a wider context with a fixed history and future, causes and effects, emotional outcomes, right and wrings and moral greys and when is doing wrong for the right reasons acceptable, when does it go too far with The Crew doing the same thing for the same reason as The Lord Ruler but how far is too far, and if the outcome is bad but not as bad as the alternative is it justified or not, when does being righteous trying to do good become evil and tyranny) and alludes to to a wider cosmos.
And that’s barely scratching the surface.
I don’t think that not using a lot of metaphors means a lack of depth.
For me, its Darksouls. Elden ring. Bloodborn. Those game struck something in me, made me realize , rich story telling doesnt have to be rich to be perceived as rich. People will fill the gaps, inside their head and make it rich anyway. The power and beauty of that aspect is that most people will never "craft" a story inside their heads that is " bad " they will naturally think and connect dots and create the world the way they want it to be more than what it actually is. Between someone mental imagination versus words on page, one is more powerful than the other.
Essentially, a good author is not someone that will print and copy paste the real story exactly as it is, inside the reader head ; a good author is someone that will tell just enough for the reader to actually become the writer, and create the story himself. Its an art though. A fine line between letting the reader confused and letting the reader become the creator.
I LOVED the movies when they came out but the older I get the less I like them. The books are much more emotional and tragic than the movies. Peter Jackson gave Arwen way more screen time but somehow conveyed less of her and Aragorn’s relationship. The Cerin Amroth scene in the books is short but it rips my heart out.
Quiet simple, really. Fantasy is no longer written by "poets"
If you look at early 20th century writers is that many of them were either studied poetry, or were practitioners of it. Clark Ashton Smith. Howard, E.R. Eddison, Dunsany etc... have all dabbled in poetry or it was their passion before even writing prose. And all that had seeped into their work.
There's a skillset to poetry, beyond just rhyming words, that's about how to write mood, a good cadence, about suggestion and abstraction. In short: atmosphere.
In time, though, they phased out of the business and we all, audience and writers alike, have grown content with whatever the genre conventions of the time except us to write and except us to read, thus one generation of copycats are replaced by another and so it shall be again, indie is no exception.
"Woe onto the nerds." - Tolkien probably.
Good observation. Poetry is vital, but it has been totally sidelined. Very sad.
Pretty much, poets and translators of poetry, most of them. That kind of thing makes a difference. Ours is an age almost entirely devoid of poetry, that generation of 1880-1920 was the last one in which truly great poets were active in quantity enough to shape sensibility in scale. What makes me sad is that poetry is so dead, and people so unaware of the skillset required, that most people would just dismiss the entire conversation as "there is nothing objective about literary merit, it is just opinion, and any opinion is as good as any other". Very sad state of affairs
I would also add that many great writers dabbled in things like philosophy and theology as well. That was a theme among the Inklings. Poetry, philosophy and theology.
YES! I recently read a quote about why The Simpsons isn't as good as it used to be: "The early Simpsons writers were experts in history, literature, politics, physics, chemistry, art, and nearly everything else. Current Simpsons writers are experts in The Simpsons."
I think that applies analogously to modern fantasy authors.
Interesting to think of LOTR as not modern. LOTR was the herald of Modern fantasy, really the transition to modern fantasy. Old School Fantasy was Robert E Howard, C. L. Moore, Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, William Morris, James Cabel Branch, H Rider Haggard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, E. R. Eddison, And if you really want to reach Ludovico Ariosto, and Edmund Spenser. There was fantasy before Tolkien.
It was the herald of modern fantasy 20yrs ago. Present day modern fantasy is a different animal. Game of Thrones left its mark, and the lower literacy rate has exploded a lot of teen/middle grade level books.
Howard, Lovecraft and Burroughs are favorites for me. Lovecraft benign the hardest to read given how he wrote but he is also the one who made the largest foot print in Horror.
Side note all three were good old fashion American pulp writers.
I read a bunch of Conan stories recently and I was struck by how modern some of them felt. Much more so than LotR. There are some that were not and would be unpublishable today, but yeah.
@@Tessa_Ru Yeah if anything I'd argue Harry Potter (as much as it pains me to say) is the herald of modern fantasy as it lead to the YA explosion and many of the currently new and upcoming authors are the generation that grew up on those books and so are likely to be directly inspired/influenced by them.
Don't forget the Bible and the Koran!
I miss strong, noble characters in a lot of modern fantasy. A great example of what I mean can be read in Elizabeth Moon’s Deed of Paksenarrion.
I love that trilogy ❤ And I agree with you that there is a lack of noble and likable (!) characters in modern storytelling.
I think another issue is the general fear of sincerity; most creators (whether they be writers, musicians, artists, etc.) are afraid of being vulnerable, so they have to wrap everything in multiple layers of irony and meta-jokes and pop-culture references and such. They don't want to just tell a sincere story.
If you've not read it already, Fonda Lee's Jade Trilogy is one of my favorite examples of modern fantasy with a very well-thought hard magic system and excellent character development. She writes action scenes very well, which is sometimes hard to do.
I'm asking myself a lot of these same questions while I'm writing my own SFF book. How much do I explain/leave out? How much do I trust the reader? How much do I trust myself, the writer?
I tend to lean the same way you do: I prefer room for interpretation. So my book will probably end up with a lot of such room, but my love for modern fantasy will help me find a (hopefully) happy balance.
Just a thought that popped into my head, it hasn't had time to put down roots yet - but it occurs to me that a good rule of thumb when using fantasy to develop your own beliefs is to ensure that the debate could have turned out elsewise. Take the theme of oppression for example; an overly polemic story will insist that the opressed will always rise up and make a better world, tyranny is evil and is doomed to fail, and so the plot will play out like simple wish fulfillment. A fuller exploration of the subject might make you wonder if they can or will succeed, show the cost in human life of inspiring simple people to rise in revolution, and even suggest the danger of something even worse rising from the chaos and bloodshed. Even Lord of the Rings, an archtype of 'good triumphing over evil', gets a lot of its depth from the sacrifice Frodo makes, and how he can never go back to his Edenic existence. We talk about making 3d villains, maybe we could also talk about how themes should be 3-dimensionalised as well.
Magic systems and mystery have to do with whether or not your main character can do magic. In LOTR, our main characters couldn't actually do magic so it didn't make sense that they would be able to understand the limits of Gandalf's power. In Harry Potter, it would have been super weird if wizards didn't understand the limits of their power - which is why Harry had to be mortal-raised and a student.
Except wizards in Harry Potter cane sesntially do anytihng they want with magic
For all you can praise rhe guy, and maybe rightfully so, I think so many of these changes can be traced directly back to Brandon Sanderson. Something I don't often see brought up is how fruustratingly unsubtle he is about his characters and themes. I think he set the pace for characters who will loudly and unsubtly announce "this is how i feel!!!" And everyone loving it
I agree! I think Sanderson is really good in making up interesting and original fantasy worlds, but his characters are oh so tiring.
For once in several years, a talk about writing has given me comfort and not anxiety. Thank you. ❤
I am just reading Fellowship of the Ring and the whole scene of Tom Bombadil was so bizarre but wholesome! hahah I died with you almost singing "old tom bombadil! he's a merry fellow!" Great video!
Tom Bombadill is so bizarre!
i do find him a strange lad yet the passages where Tom helps the hobbits understand the "lives of trees" and talks about times long past reaching back to an age "before the seas were bent" are some of my most favourite in all of Tolkien :)
The audiobook is fantastic. The voice of Andy Serkis is magnificent, and although I wasn't all that fond of the singing, this was so catchy
@@libraryofaviking and it makes him endearing
Frodo didn't say "I don't know why, it makes me sad". Sam said it. It's a telescoping of Sam's interest in and sympathy for the Elves in the book. He's always hankering after stories about Elves, and he says several times how much he wants to see them.
I noticed that the change in publishing made an enormous difference in books nowadays.
Publishing has become a lot more accessible to more people, and while that sometimes can be a good thing (stories and themes that were hard to get through can now be written and more easily published), it also created a lack of professionalism.
I've started to read a lot again the last two years, and with newer books I noticed most of them have a fun idea for a world, an okayish understanding of the themes they want to write about, and reasonable character building and dialogue, but rarely know the language to convey those things. Most of these books come across as if the writers love books, but never studied language, and the language needed to write world- and character building, or how to write visually, or to write fluent dialogue. There are a lot of books I read I was sure it was a debut novel that turned out to be the fifth book or something published, where I was wondering what the editors were doing and if they were even present.
There are still a lot good books written (I have read a lot of good books too), but it's harder to find them in the sea of these books.
On the other hand, I've also heard authors complaining about the fan base of books, and the discourse of fans, mostly online, where (dark) romance seems to be very popular, where it's almost impossible for the books that aren't about these things to get noticed and talked about. Marketing of books really changed due to things like book tiktok, and it's become a lot harder for books to find it's right audience, where it's both hard for the readers to find the books they want to read, and the authors to sell their books because it doesn't find the right fans. I at least find it rather difficult to find the books I want to read.
It's the weird idea of books being marketed for as large an audience as possible, instead of books finding the right readers.
I personally found Twilight for this reason absolutely horrible, I never read it, but it changed the fantasy selection in the library and bookstores so drastically that for a while any fantasy books I found were actually romance in a meh to okayish written fantasy world, and it's actually why I stopped reading for a couple of years. I'm not a fan of romance in fantasy (or most book genres) in general because too often it's just 'he's a guy, she's a girl, of course they'll become a couple', and I find that very boring character- and relationship building.
It might just be the books I picked up, but a lot of newer books I read also feel kind of like fanfiction in that in a lot of books the main characters feels like a self insert from the author, or 'as bland as possible so as many people as possible can identify with them' characters.
I remember older books I read where the characters where allowed to be kind of weird, or eccentric, their own being, they were all allowed to just be all very different characters, it felt like you met a new character, instead of being like 'do I see myself in their shoes'. Like if we take LOTR for example, they were all their own character, with their own story, their own feelings and experience of the world, their own place in the world and in the story. It wasn't a 'do I see myself in Aragon's shoes', but a 'what a great character'.
Not saying you didn't have self insert of bland characters in the past, because that has always been a thing, it's just that these seems to be very normalized and the norm in most fantasy books.
But maybe I need to find better books (please, give me recommendations :D).
This is a very good and thorough analysis of the situation.
And I think it deserves more concern, because it spoils the way future generations will read stories, watch movies and experience things in general.
Maybe publishers only want to publish things that the majority will like or sell the most, not books that are the best and challenge society.
@@AB-dz7lo
The point is that everybody who takes the time to write down a story tends to think that they are a wise genius having written a work of art that is perfect.
Publishers of the past usually gave this a reality check and worked with writers in order to cut the gem, make it shine and put it into a wider context.
Behind every influential literary movement in history there was usually a visionary publisher.
The problems described here are in no small part due to a world of self-publicized vanity projects and fanfiction that infected modern publishing as well.
At this point those publishers are merely printers and distributors.
As someone who deals a lot with traditional publishers in the IT area "professionalism" is not what comes to mind when looking at the way they barely have a grasp of the books they themselves publish, mixing up categories, their inability to even tell which book is which in a certain series or even the publishing dates or authors in many cases. I think you might be thinking more of a more iterative and longer editing process with experienced editors with older books.
Modern fantasy has lost "romanticism".
The modern works are often shallow, pretending to be deep. But LOTR is a depth of histories and cultures built just to tell this story. People might criticize LOTR for seeming like a "softhard core. Because they don't know about Eru and Melkor and the Maiar, etc,... But really, I do believe, it's only delivered that way so as to preserve the sense of wonder in the things not fully known to all. In truth, there is a deep lore and rules to everything, but we only see the characters going through the world and learning parts. That kind of world world building is so hardcore.
As for the deus ex machina... I think when it's set up well and pays off, we call it the Eucatastrophe which Tolkien talked about, and it's a powerful reminder that even at the brink of death, hope can arrive unexpectedly bringing victory back from defeat.
The critical drinker reviewed the modern star treks and said the reason they are so different, so lacking in the crew showing each other respect etc is the writers have never done anything with their lives. They have lived comfortable lives and gone straight into writings
Whereas the original Star Trek writers fought I the Korean wars. They knew the chain of command, they respected each other even if they didn’t like each other etc.
Tolkien and CS Lewis were at Cambridge university together.
But they also had both fought in the First World War.
Lord of the Rings was written by Tolkien as a gift to the uk people as a Modern mythology.
But it was him working out his experiences of war and PTSD.
Frodo has PTSD at the end. That is why he cannot get back to living life like Sam can and be happy. He sees Sam get married and knows he never can because the wraith’s blade had gone into him and there is no recovery from that. So he goes with the elves. He goes to Heaven with them. He commits suicide and is received with love into Heaven with people who love and respect him.
The same happened in the chronicles of narnia. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lord Roop had been stranded on the island of nightmares. CS Lewis again decided the only cure for PTSD was death. So the wizard put Lord Roop to sleep at Aslan’s Table where he would sleep until the end of time when Aslan would return and give new life to everyone.
These scene are much deeper than people realise.
The modern books are nowhere near as good because the writers have never done anything. They have had normal lives.
Ernest Hemingway said you cannot sit down to write if you have not stood up to live.
I can write about security businesses and reformed murderers and much more because I have experience of working with these things. I’ve had some crazy jobs and life experiences. I speak 5 languages, I have lived in other countries, I do different things even though I am working class and have little money. And so I can write authentically about these things.
I will be integrating a lot of Celtic mythology into a future novel. I will have to read a lot but also go walking out in the wilds of Scotland and Ireland to get authentic experiences. I have just included a song that is perfect for the novel and I know that from the Irish singing group I go to.
You have to live to write. Most people don’t realise this. And by “live” I mean the sorts of life on the edge, life by a thread experiences. But don’t deliberately put yourself in danger. That is just stoopid. But go and do crazy jobs, with the backup and framework of the job. Be around great workmates who have experience and a great sense of humour. Then you can write authentically.
Isn't a better/more comfortable life for the next generation a big part of what previous generations aimed to achieve? "because the writers have never done anything." is a supremely arrogant thing to say, based on a fairly arbitrary/subjective metric and can apply to more than just writers/authors. "Strive to live a full life, but live it sensibly." is good advice, sure, but shouldn't necessarily be an obstacle towards those folk with rich, creative minds who have yet to go through (and may _never_ go through) particular experiences.
By the way, Critical D is a blatant right-wing reactionary. There's no question about where his motivation stems.
Books are often too preachy in regards to themes. I think authors are afraid that readers will take something out of the book that they weren’t intending. However, that just shows how deep and rich the story is when people can take different perspectives from the story depending on their life experiences, values, etc. When authors preach, it keeps the reader from intellectually engaging with the story to the same extent.
My friend, books have always been preachy.
Careful not to fall into the easy trap of calling everything you disagree with political or preachy while overlooking everything else.
Agree, literature should be ambiguous and have room for interpretation
@@Dysfunctional_Reprint Some books are meant to be preachy, such as self-help books, current event books, and other non-fiction types. When I read those books, I expect and understand. However, that's not what I want from fiction, whether the author agrees with my world view or not. I'm quite capable of analyzing themes of books whether I agree with them or not.
people really dont care whether their book's theme was misunderstood as "oh, it was meant to be a gay message but its great it applied to your straight relationship", they moreso care when misunderstandings are "you must support this messed up thing because i couldnt infer that this plot point was included out of necessity rather than indulgence" lol in prior times, whether its to be directly blamed on social media prevalence or any combination of factors, authors didnt have to worry so much about what one person thought of their work. they were always going to be the largest authority to speak on their own work. now, social media figures can have more pull over a book's image than the author OR reader, and that's a little weird.
Great take. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur Clarke. To me, this means we don't fully understand "magic," and Brandon Sanderson basically writes science fiction when it comes to his powers. Nothing wrong with that! I think this is a cool blending of sci-fi and fantasy, which already have much in common in their attempts to explore human issues in a non-Earth setting.
In my series, I'm trying to blend hard and soft in 2 ways: 1) our protagonist learns more about the magic as the books progresses (soft --> hard), and 2) the capabilities magic gives become less predictable and controllable as the books progress (hard --> soft).
I completely agree about the themes being hammered in with no room left for a reader to evaluate it through the process of their own self-discovery. It is hard to ignore when a book feels as if the author forgets the actual story they have been developing in favor of trying to hit home some social/political/economic view they hold. This is especially true in the middle grade and young adult books. (I read those a lot having 6 kids and many nieces and nephews). Children and teens, while often needing hand holding, are not stupid. I personally believe there is more growth for a child having picked up on the subtle cues and understanding them, than having someone say in not so many words "think this about this character and theme."
I would go so far as to question if the lack of fiction that makes them practice picking up those cues and considering lots of situations they don't encounter in their own life could be what is causing the lack of understanding of social subtleties.
18:30 - On the whole "not knowing how it works making magical characters feel more mystical and powerful" - Ambient magic from Tamora Pierce's _Circle_ universe is kind of like this from the other side. In the first quartet the kids are simply learning how to use their magic (and occasionally do something crazy by accident) and we learn the basic rules behind their soft magic, but by the second quartet they're all capable of Gandalf-level powerful acts, and because ambient magic isn't very well-known outsiders can't really tell how it works. Most magic in this setting is called academic magic, and works by traditional hard rules.
Dune is very subtle in warning against fake prophets and propaganda, more than half the people were still cheering for paul until we were literally told, at face that he is not the choosen one😂
I think the key lies in striking the right balance for the particular story an author is telling. There is a place for subtle themes and overt. One is not better than the other. One doesn't necessarily make better art then the other, they are just different kinds of art. We need both. Kind of like sometimes I just want to read a fluffy romance because in those moments it's what my soul needs, while at other times I need a book that tackles hard life issues. Both are art! Both have a place. We need classic-style fantasy to bring us into that place of wonder and we need modern styles to help us flesh out deep targeted themes. Each story calls for its own recipe in how it's presented to the reader. The point about trusting your reader is really important though. Ultimately I just hope we never stop seeing people writing from their hearts. Soulless OVERLY formulaic storytelling can be more of a wonder killer then overt themes.
A similar effect can be seen with books and movies that "take themselves too seriously", mistakes that are easy to forgive and disbelief that is easy to suspend in a fourth-wall-breaking comedy are harder to accept or ruin the whole thing in a dead serious work of fiction.
I thought you said the difference is in the "Onyx Flame". I was wracking my brain to think of the Onyx Flame in LOTR. Finally I heard you say it again and realized you said "the unexplained". Now we need someone to write a series based on The Onyx Flame!
Great video. Lately, I've been missing that older style of fantasy. Less of the "scientific" rules of magic, and more wonder. Worldbuilding only what's necessary for the story to come to life. More subtlety. I'm going to have to embark on an epic quest to find good books that fit that criteria written in the past five or so years. But...next week Tad William's latest book will be released, so I think I can put off the quest a _bit_ longer.
Thank you! I can relate to your comment. I recently read Mythago Wood and was mesmerised by it!
@@libraryofaviking Time to move _Mythago Wood_ a little higher on my list.
Yes, this. I think it has to do with the idea of "Lúthien sang a song of enchantment, and the Orcs fell asleep" instead of "Kaladin has only 3 Stormlight infused spheres left. He must ration out his next 3 moves." The latter doesn't fill me with wonderment, even though it's action-packed and exciting.
I don't think the problem is too much world building, but the wrong kind of world building. There is this idea of "hard magic" vs "soft magic," where hard magic has strict, well-defined rules that are told to the reader directly and in detail and work in a mechanical way, while soft magic is allowed to be magical instead of quasi-scientific.
You have have deep lore and world-building, including about magic, without turning your fantasy story into sci-fi wearing a fake mustache. The problem is that the trend right now is towards hard magic, with many readers and authors falling into the idea that the harder the magic the better, and soft magic is bad and lazy. I put a lot of the blame on Brandon Sanderson and his third law, which states that the extent to which magic can solved problems in fiction is proportional to how much the reader understands it. I think the quote lacks nuance, and that a distinction should be made between how much readers understand the limitations of magic and what it can do, and how much the readers know about where it comes from, what it is, and how it works. I think it's possible to give the reader enough of an idea of what magic can and can't do, and what it's costs are, for the story to work without having to completely demystify it and ruin the wonder that should be at the heart of fantasy.
@@tauoniclightning6697 That's Sanderson's first law, and it doesn't actually say that. The law says that a fantasy author's ability to resolve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands that magic. The law actually says more or less what you want to say. It's not a prescription for hard magic systems nor is it a proposal for soft ones. It just means a writer's ability to convey how his or her magic works, directly affects how it can be used narratively.
If they had flown the ring to Mordor on eagles, the eagles would have been torn apart by the fell beasts and the Nazgul, that's why!
Or the eagles would've wanted to try the ring for themselves. You know, to impress the female eagles!
"I wasn't tempted to use its power, but now I have eagles at my command. I think I'll put the ring on." Gandalf knows they'd be the world's biggest target. The bad guys have dragons.
@@khyrianstorms wtf are you talking about...
This video is a fresh breath of air. I have been writing a fantasy novel, and I have been reviewing a lot of videos like this. Thankfully, my construct of everything that makes up my story, its plot, the characters origins etc; has complied with what readers want and crave. It is true. Not everyone wants so much detail. Sometimes less is more. Writers are the maestro to entertainment, and not everything needs to be known. Especially for fantasy.
You’re forgetting the elephant in the room. The reason Tolkien's books are superior is because they aren’t tainted by the misanthropic, nihilistic sarcasm that has its claws in modern philosophy: because Tolkien’s worldview (and we cannot escape an author’s religion impacting their work) engendered a far more meaningful undercurrent that tied everything together.
Clicked on the video because Im on book 3 of the Poppy War trilogy and really enjoying it. Theres so much good fantasy/fiction coming out. Worst thing we can do to aritsts/authors is try to set limits on what is good or bad. Breaking the mold is how the greats are made
The difference can be summarized in one item: different writters. All those differences happen because writters of today are both influenced by what already came before them, which already makes it so what they write can't be the same, and because we have a very high abundance of writers and opportunities for books and that makes it so what is "selected" is not the best you could find, however, at the same time there is a better chance for in the middle of it for real gems to appear that would otherwise be ignored because of the "standards" of the publishers.
Also what @Eluarelon said, that these "classics" are a very small sample of what existed in that time and was popularized, so it doesn't actually represent a gold standard that was changed, or lost.
At the beginning of the video and the part about "leaving some things unexplained" I immediately thought about The Mirror Visitor series by Christelle Dabos.
I think that it does it really well, and it's modern fantasy. You're enchanted, left imagining more. It's low fantasy, and far from perfect, but it definitely *feels* nostalgic! It has that ~old fantasy~ vibe.
Recommend for anyone who likes low fantasy, mystery, and slow stories. By the end, it's really great imo.
I've actually been using this concept in my own writing, without even knowing it was a writing philosophy with a name and history. It's just something I naturally slipped into, because I wanted the environmental storytelling of my world to feel like the promotional artwork (+German game guide artwork) Katsuya Terada did for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Triforce of the Gods in Japan), and Link's Awakening, while also making a world as vast as that of One Piece & Avatar: The Last Airbender, or classics like Tolkien's Legendarium & Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.
Katsuya Terada's artwork just _captured_ me as a child, and the Zelda games A Link to the Past, Link's Awakening, and the Oracle duology had other key art by another artist that just added onto the feeling that Terada's artwork and the games' art direction and story gave me. It all gives off such a mystical vibe of adventure, freedom, and mystery. The attention to detail in every drawing makes everything feel like such a living, storied world; shrouded deep by darkness and decay. It's peak dark fantasy (without tipping too far into grimdark), and the exact kind of vibe I want to try to emulate with my writing now. I've also recently been reading the Twilight Princess manga, written and illustrated by Akira Himekawa. I'm not that far in yet, but the story additions and their artstyle are both already giving me that same sense of vastness, history, and ages long forgotten. I also have dozens of themes I want to express through my work, many of which interlink and relate to each other. A wide and storied world is what I feel is best to communicate all of it without being ham-fisted about it, so it all comes together nicely!
poppy war and tolkien are completely different, conveying different messages and telling completely different stories. now, i haven't watched the video yet, but using tolkien and the poppy war in the thumbnail is like comparing apples and oranges.
Kinda the point of the video. Way more nuanced, but yeah: "These days don't write books like Tolkien did back in the day" is pretty much the main point of that discussion.
i very much don't like poppy war its has nothing i can care about in a series while lotr knows what makes people care.
@@nothappening5510 that doesn't really have anything to do with what I was trying to say
@@brianbarrett6316 my point is that you can compare them one offers nothing to latch onto making it a very obnoxious read because none of the characters actions matter besides one and she does something every agrees is dumb and evil
Exactly.
Sorry, saying Samwise is only good is too simplistic. He do have some dubious attitudes that are usually overlooked. His treatment of Gollum is not exactly stellar.
Side note: the term Deus ex Machina comes from ancient Greek theatre. The word 'machina', literally machinery, was the name given to the ropes and pulleys etc above the stage from which angels were lowered etc. Most Greek dramas were about human frailty and how people mess up everything. The script would play out until close to the end when the whole situation looked hopelessly entangled. And then one of the gods would arrive from Olympus, lowered onto the stage from the machinery. The god would tell everybody to stand still and he/she would tell everyone what is now going to happen with each person to sort out the strife. Once the god sorted out the humans the play would end. 'God from the machinery' got taken into modern theatre for when an author writes in a too convenient solution.
I did a 180 on Bombadil. Didn't get it as a kid, but became one of my favorite parts as an adult.
That feeling is called childhood discovery.
As an “older” reader.. it’s been very difficult to explain the difference in the “feel” of books now, vs books I read as a kid/teen in the 80s&90s..
There IS a difference in just publishing in general these days that has a nearly tangible effect on books published in the days of the internet and the ‘death of the printed word’..
It seems that the environment that many authors are in today, the whole, ‘better have that sequel out within so many months’ or you lose your sliver of interest from the market..
..it’s very different from the days of yore when waiting a year or more for the next book was just how it WAS..
There really isn’t a way that, except for the rare few, authors won’t feel pressured to put out product fast, but also, feel pressed to “distinguish” their world building from the pack..
🤔
Also.. just a caveat from someone who grew up without a TV, thanks to a hippie parent, there also was no internet or anything else..
..from a psychological and sociological perspective, the way people thought and “imagined” things, before there were millions of brilliantly colored images and media available, to draw from in their mind for imagery or inspiration, is just fundamentally DIFFERENT..
..I’m in the perplexing position to have experienced the world before media dominance, and after.. and frankly, it’s weird..
..the way my brain USED to ‘imagine’ 40 years ago, as a free range kid’s entertainment, was different than the way my imagination works now..
..It’s virtually impossible to keep all the endless images of other people’s make believe creatures and worlds from intruding somewhere, somehow..
..It seems to me, that the lens that we have experienced the world with, will always have a profound impact on how we write. There has been another “revolution” in society in the recent years. I don’t think people are the same anymore. The way they imagine and create must change as well..
Sorry to prattle 😅
ATB
👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿
👏👏👏
I'm 51. 100% agree.
Very well said! I sometimes feel modern fantasy moves too quickly because people’s attention spans are being reduced severely by consuming short form content. I can still sort of remember how I used to imagine things before watching a lot of TV and having unlimited access to the internet and it was indeed very different.
i had always tragically associated my dwindling imagination to dissociation, pot, just adult exhaustion, maybe a mix of all those and more. but, if others are noticing this kind of thing, that may be something to look at.
i used to be a Maladaptive Daydreamer. my imagination couldnt stop, it would actively sweep my days away. i also preferred reading to entertain myself, if i wasnt just drawing whatever reading inspired me to draw. but now it's like... television static in my brain.
i can try to visualize things but its so hard unless i'm, like, smoking and just in a really low-pressure environment. which doesnt happen much cuz i only get given a single day off at a time, so now weekend-long creative benders for me lolll
Samwise isn't 'pure good'-if he were, he would have shown Gollum pity and permitted him to touch Frodo ("pawing at his master") and, Tolkien wrote later, Gollum would have sincerely repented. Letter 246.
Grimdark has been around since the 80s. GoT didn't popularize it at all.
The IPs of Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40K predate all of that by 10-15 years, and its literally the tagline from 40K - it didnt exist as a concept prior to that, and 40K gave birth to it.
By definition, GOT doesn't share a lot of tropes with Grimdark beyond surface level capacity. Westeros isnt dystopian, its oligarchal with a constant theme of breaking the cycle of power and lineage - ala Johnson and Morcock. It's a reaction to Tolkein, but is not anti-Tolkien. It craves the light, and it's heroics, but positions it's characters as flawed along the opposite lines, and whom cannot achieve their ambition.
GoT is a mixture of Low and Dark Fantasy, as opposed to something like LOTR which is heroic and high fantasy.
These genres have been around for decades and are really the dividing line here.
High Fantasy and Heroic Fantasy showcase the good triumphant over the forces of chaos, entropy, and decay while upholding traditional values systems of sacrifice, honor, faith, and protection. The armor of faith and the sword of truth. It's very humanist in that regard.
Dark Fantasy inverts that. Showing chaos and entropy as natural cycles whereby even the most optimistic and hopeful eventually fall to their own ambition and desires. It has a more fatalistic and nihilistic outlook on its world. Where sacrifice is twisted into conservation at all cost. Where even a good king can become corrupt and the hero doesn't always win, or is sometimes not the shining knight.
That's what Morcock did with Elric. He flipped Tolkein's tropes on their head, making Elric a narcissistic drug-addicted weakling, but was our protagonist.
Grimdark and GoT may share some concepts, but it's Dark Fantasy at its core elements. Another in the tradition of Morcock rather than Warhammer 40K.
I get that GoT is called out in wikis as being Grimdark, but between 40K and something like Elric, it aligns more with Morcock than it does the Black Library.
im laughing at myself with the way the first line of your comment confused me. i was about to leave your comment under yours until i continued reading. i was like "GoT?? Grimdark?? How can people possibly compare GoT with like... WH40K??" and then you brought it up xD
There is an award-winning fantasy book (I picked it up because of this) that starts off nearly immediately with "slavery bad", not even ten paragraphs in, and it was presented about that bluntly with pure exposition, rather than with a scene or a character interaction or anything regarding the setting. That was just the introduction, and there was no context presented. I put the book back on the shelf immediately. Everyone agrees slavery is bad, but one can do better than "Hey, by the way, reader..." I agreed with the message but hated the delivery, and dropped it already knowing I wasn't going to get immersed in the story. I would say on the whole writing has gotten lazier, and people lack subtlety or the ability to step outside of themselves anymore. Writing is, after all, quite a bit like acting. Tolkien was a war veteran who disdained conflict, but there was never a scene that went, "And then Bilbo looked into the camera with his new dwarven friends, and said 'Human conflict, especially mechanized warfare with machines and artillery, is a very terrible thing!'" If there had been, it's likely he wouldn't be as popular.
Awesome Astrid.
Great video! I completely agree that modern stories are more overt with their themes, especially so with tv shows and movies of the last several years. It often seems that the theme/message is more important than the story. People generally appreciate themes, but only if the story is good. Bob Iger even said that Disney got carried away, and needs to get back to story first, messaging second.
When it comes to film/TV, I have a strong intuition that the source of this issue is in too much studio committee involvement in production dictating a "widest possible net" approach, especially to fantasy adaptations. The studio and/or writing team have no trust in the audience's basic intelligence, and it shows in the over-explanatory, over-simplified plots and dialogue.
@ I agree. I think studio exec interfence is a huge issue, especially with Disney and DC
I think part of it is that modern fantasy is also a lot more character-focused than older work. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, but there's only so many times you can read about super assassins or wannabe-viking BAMFs before they feel like the same tired rendition from some other book you barely remember. I've noticed that with modern fantasy it's the character driven stories that focus on a very different kind of life that we don't typically see in Every Fantasy Book Ever that feels fresh and exciting - think Sword of Kaigen or Green Bone for example.
Yeah theres definitely something to that. I think it can lead to the protag adventure feeling mundane because we have a look into how they react to everything if that makes sense. Thlugh robin hobb pulls it off
Interesting points! Personally, I prefer character driven stories but can definitely see there is potential for a story to get repetitive!
Agreed. I lke character focused, but why are the characters all so much? Maybe the hero doesn't need to be an assassin secret princess vampire and can just be one thing?
I've found that magic systems are the death of themes. In many fantasy books the magic system basically replaces any theming. Instead of interesting commentary by the author we just get a bunch of rules and spells to worry about and that's it. The proliferation of magic systems has lead to stories based around magic systems, rather than stories based around themes. I can think of many books like this, Promise of Blood was my realization of this, and recently The Will of the Many, books with basically no themes and just magic.
It's also lead to a simplification and misunderstanding of what themes even are, a mistake this video makes. Power, oppression and redemption are not themes, they're just subjects. They are what the story is about. Themes are arguments. They are statements made by the author to the reader through their characters, with each character offering a particular point of view or argument for or against that theme. Power is a subject; "Power corrupts" is a theme. Oppression is a subject; "Oppression turns the oppressed into oppressors" is a theme. Redemption is a subject; "No evil is beyond redemption" is a theme.
That is two ways to pass a message, one is two tell exactly as it is mutiple times until the person memorize the narrative. Two is to create logical way for the person to arrive at that conclusion by themselves. Modern writers cant do the second because often in their own lives the were teach what to think instead of how to think. And they afraid people wont arrive to the same conclusion as they.
Always felt like Robert Jackson Bennet and Bryan Staveley had an older fantasy feel despite being more modern authors. Divine Cities and Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne both had so much mysterious intrigue integrated into them!
Both authors I hope to read soon!!
Two underrated modern authors who are mostly ignored on booktube for some reason. Solid 4 star authors for me.
I'm gonna check them out. 🤔 thanks for the rec!
Honestly, I have to disagree (at least somewhat) with the whole mystery-vs-explanation dichotomy.
First off, I don't personally find that explanations inherently interfere with a sense of wonder at all; and thus don't generally accept the premise that mystery-and-wonder vs explanation are two mutually exclusive sides of whatever coin is in question. (One example that comes to mind of how they can coexist is the manga Hunter x Hunter; it has a highly-detailed hard-magic system used for all sorts of complex puzzle-like conflicts [and even frequently launches into lengthy info-dumps about all sorts of super specific rules and systems] yet still manages to constantly surprise the reader with an intense sense of wonder and awe at nearly every turn and in an _insane_ variety of ways).
And don't forget, for all Tolkien's sense of wonder and mystery he wove into Middle Earth, he explained far more than most authors do (even more than many modern authors); he achieved his sense of mystery and wonder not by merely 'leaving things unexplained' but by careful, deliberate writing choices in how he presented and portrayed things, and when he explained them. A large part of this is that most of the POV characters (aka, the various Hobbits) don't ever understand things all the way (even if the reader might), and any sense of wonder lost through explanation and worldbuilding can be recaptured vicariously through them (consider how the "Mumakil" are vague, big, ominous fantasy beasts; but when Sam instead identifies an "Oliphaunt" and is in awe of what he's seeing; we, the audience, have actually just gotten the creature explained to us almost fully, yet the sense of wonder at it has actually increased, all because of the characters' perspective on things).
It's also, I think, hugely underappreciated what a master of language Tolkien was. The guy was a scholar of linguistics, mythology, history, and poetry; when he wanted to create awe in the reader, it didn't matter whether they knew or understood the details and explanations of what he was talking about; it mattered _how_ he talked about it, how the crafting of epic and mythological words and images made the reader _feel_ what he wanted them to feel.
I think this, even more than the hard-magic/worldbuilding stuff, is actually a major contributing factor to the shift in the sense of wonder in modern fantasy; the fact that modern writing often strives to be more invisible and less elaborate than the style of older works (I bet if you compared a well-explained, hard-magic series with poetic prose to a mysterious and left-to-the-imagination one told through simple 'beige' prose; the poetic one would still feel more 'classic fantasy' the majority of the time).
As far as the themes stuff goes; I think probably the biggest contributor is, again, the stylistic tendencies of modern writing. I don't think writers actually think we need to be hit over the head with obvious messages (although publishers might generally think that we do, and push authors more in that direction); but I think the screen-writing-influenced meta of: {3 Act Structure + Conflict + Character Arc + "Cut out all the unnecessary stuff" + "Emphasize the climax as much as possible"}; which works great for making clear, compact, characters and plots; often struggles trying to fit themes into that same framework (but seems to be largely presented as the 'default' way to tell stories) without it being either too faint to say anything interesting about them, or too 'overt-message' to let the ideas sit with the reader in the way that often works best for themes (I think that films have learned how to take advantage of their medium to deliver a lot of the thematic work in visual/audio/acting/directing elements that novels mimicking the 3-act structure of films don't know how to make up for).
Nice to see the classics getting love and a deeper look at what is happening in fantasy. I can’t read this genre today- not that there aren’t some great ones out there, but I find the readers demand for (and publishers complicity w/) recognizable tropes and ‘backstory’, in place of creating say, atmosphere or clever themes or true emotional resonance….is pulling the writing into a dumbed down versions of what’s possible within the genre. It’s a cranky view, sure, but I’d rather be cranky and critical than bored! 😅
I recently re-watched Lord of the Rings and noticed that Gandalf isn't much of a wizard. He uses his staff to hit people and fights with a sword, but rarely is able to cast any magical spells. He is more of an old street bum that found a pointy hat and a walking stick. lol
The fantasy I have enjoyed in the past is the older Dragonlance books. I wish they were still in print so I could get the whole set.
Projecting a magical force field that destroys a massive flaming sword.
Channeling (divine?) lightning through a sword.
Resisting a fireball.
Uttering destruction into existence.
Turning pinecones into fire grenades.
Summoning an equine by whistling.
Those are pretty stark displays of power.
Great stuff!
Its not a fantasy per se, but The Hunger Games is an example of a great modern story that really resonates for me emotionally and intellectualy. It made me feel many emotions like the ending of Lord of the rings. This story also ends in a bittersweet way.
Hard Magic systems are...just not great. They have no wonder, no whimsy, no mystery. It was fun once, but has been done to death now.
Did you watch Tale Foundry's video too?
I do agree with the point, but I think you can still make it work as long as you know what you aim for. If you make a hard magic system you just have to know it's going to feel like a mix of sci-fi and fantasy, and the sense of wonder has to come from elsewhere.
I have a habit of overexplaining irl though, so take it with a grain of salt if you will.
Also what has to be said, you need to know the uses, and strengths and weaknesses of systems. Hard magic systems are mostly useful for making up interesting solutions, basically treating it like science.
That means it will be more enjoyable for eggheads, rather than daydreamers.
Both preferences are valid, and I don't want hard magic systems to go away. But authors shouldn't force themselves to build one if it doesn't serve their style or vision, themes or setting, and whatever else.
There is one CRUCIAL thing that a lot of modern fantasy fails at is contrast. Start with a small, little start like lotr with the shire, and the ending will feel even more epic, sure, you can have a epic prologue first to set up the story but then quickly have a simple, humble start.
I would love a new fantasy series that focuses around a "Chosen One" character, with a perfect mix between Old School fantasy and Grim Dark fantasy. John Gwynne's The Faithful and The Fallen series comes damn close. Any other tips? ⚔
hope you read Philip Chase's Way of Edan then. If not, do yourself a favor and pick it up ASAP. I'd also recommend Guy Gavriel Kay (at least the early works, because I have no idea if the later stuff still hit that feel in the way Fionavar and Tigana did.
@Eluarelon Thank you! Will check out! 🤠
@@BobaFerd Hope you'll enjoy it. It takes on that Chosen One trope in a very interesting way, it's deeply rooted in old mythology similar to Tolkien and the more introspective parts feel very tolkienesque (in a very good way) to me in the way they provoke thoughts and make me feel. It's also pretty grim in parts, because there's a lot of war involved and Mr. Chase can get pretty descriptive in those scenes.
Same thing with Guy Gavriel Kay, though he started writing back in the 80's so he probably should be included in the "Fantasy Classic" category. He used to work with Christopher Tolkien in editing Silmarillion and especially the Fionavar trilogy, by no means a simple copy, feels thematically very similar to Tolkien. More steeped in celtic and arthurian mythology it can also get pretty grim at times, and had a few scenes that would have probably made me DNF it if written by a lesser writer.
@@Eluarelon Damn, sounds amazing! Will get on ASAP!
The Bound and the Broken by Ryan Cahill!
Not a book, but maybe a fun fact? 😆 Hi from Romania! I automatically started humming the most popular local folk-rock song when you started talking about the 'ubi sunt' motif. It makes up the whole chorus of "Amintire cu haiduci" by Valeriu Sterian (Memory of haiduks? I guess it could be translated that way). Of course, in romanian it would be "unde sunt" - not far off though, right? Haha. "Unde sunt pistoalele? Unde sunt pumnalele?" - "Where have the haiduks gone?" sort of thing. The chorus that everybody here knows and most are fond of: "Where are their guns? Where are their daggers? The haiduks' horses and rifles?" The motif must be one of the reasons it stayed popular for decades after the singer's death (in 2000). It's just that feeling!
I got tired of fantasy when the series became longer and longer… 6,8, 10 books with years of waiting between them. ”I’ll write until they nail my coffin shut” Yes, and then someone else is writing the end and it feels like crap. Or the author got lost in dussins of books addressing the before and around and never comes back to the original story. Or the books became a tv show and runs over both the story and its end and the author looses his interest. And as you said, profetias and heros and save the world for evil darks… after ten of those, you know them all… I do want to read fantasy again, but it’s hard to get a start. But for sure, I’ll never again start reading a series which isn’t finished….😂
Great channel and content. I enjoyed your take, and agree with you. I don’t like overt or heavy-handed themes or immoral messages. I like soft magic, mysterious and powerful, and unexplained. The lost cents of ancient history and secrets, all of those things do add to the appeal of LOTR.
A lot of the older books did feel too wordy and slow, but the modern push to have a shorter and faster paced story also seems like it might miss some thing. I feel like a book can achieve the right balance. Don’t have an example of one though.😊
Thank you!
I love how Robin Hobb gets some love in this video, she gets overlooked far too often...
Re politics in Fantasy (or any other Genre of Fiction) i think it is the other way around and puting ideologidal statements in there is the escapism, because this allows the writer to avoid reality and all its problems (like: your favorite policy has allready been tried and failed, catastrophicall, multiple times)
The examples of "modern" fantasy that you flash on the screen at 23:08 actually contains a lot of CLASSIC fantasy (and not Modern Fantasy of the last 20 years )- Wheel of Time, Shannara, Wizard of Earthsea, Song of Ice and Fire, Deed of Paksenarrion, Discworld, Memory, Sorrow and Thorne, Eye of the World, etc...
I wonder how much of the difference can be ascribed to the different life experiences of "classic" vs modern fantasy writers. Tolkien, for example, was heavily influenced by having served in World War I (and lived through World War II) and by being immersed in old literature and languages and mythology, and not in the modern media that today's writers grew up with.
I am a semi intelligent human being. Authors who bash people over the head with political themes bore me. Mostly because their thesis only survives in a fantasy universe that they have dictatorial control over. I have found that authors who want to propagate a belief to readers are often incapable of examining their themes and ideas in challenging ways that represent multiple side or aspects of an issue. As you said in the video, too often, we are told what to think and are not allowed to arrive at a conclusion by thorough examination of the positive and negative aspects of an issue.
What about issues that have no positive aspects? I am writing about such issues. What is good in human child sacrifice? Or what is "positive aspect" of child molesting? There are none, so there won't be and should't be any examination of "the positive [...] aspects of an issue".
That can be said of any themes though, political or not. I sometimes find allegory really alluring, even if I don’t agree with the themes it’s purveying. Narnia and Harry Potter would be very different stories had they not been Christian allegories. Star Wars would’ve been very different had they not been political allegories.
@@theq6797 Yes plus the "semi intelligent human" was interesting! Political satire can be done well, when it's blunt/unsubtle in its metaphors (narrative devices).
We need more stuff like Willow and works with the power myth gave us/, even ones which depart from the Tolkien and English model. Greek, Roman, Norse, Chinese all have real myths and power to them.
When Theoden is donning his armor before the final stand at Helm’s Deep and recites the “Where is the horse and its rider?” poem … the what-if visions of Arwen and Elrond about her outliving Aragorn …
Silo (Wool) is a beautiful example of how to write modern "fantasy".
The elements in the story are classical "fantasy"
6:44 .. when you’re telling someone a story, there’s a substantial difference between creating a mystery, that they are interested in pursuing further..
and
Telling a story that feels kinda flat, kinda unfinished, because there’s nothing much there TO be curious about..
😊
Sam Gamgee's impatience with Smeagol probably prevented his redemption. Sam is good in intention, but he falls short too.
Hello, I’m Cecilia. It’s lovely to meet you!
I love this video. Agree with much you said. I love modern fantasy, but the feeling you described in the beginning (with lotr/hp/star wars) is the same for me. I sometimes blame it on nostalgia, and I don't think your points in this video can explain everything, but there is something there for sure. Or we just have to wait 20-30 years for the next big thing with as much impact as those things had.
@@Degrad21 thank you :)
A book written 100 to 20 years ago, will naturally feel different from a book written in the last 20 years, just because the world events that impacted those writers are different from the world events that impacting modern writers. Your own experiences obviously also change your understanding, so while teenage you might struggle to understand a character's motivations, or find something mysterious, 40 year old you won't.
As a writer, i want to interject where you have noticed modern fantasy is getting shorter and shorter. The reason for this is because authors are forced to write within specific word counts to be published. Our work isn’t even considered if we don’t fit into that category of word count. It’s incredibly disheartening as a writer trying to fit within those requirements. Trust me, we’d love the opportunity to expand and explore and I’ve read some amazing stories by amazing authors that know once their manuscripts have to be sent off to agents they’ll need to shorten and cut many parts of the manuscript
The almighty editors.
Most modern entertainment has become a hammer with which to bash the enjoyer over the head with a message now - it's why I hate it. Present me with arguments and situations and let me come to my own conclusions.
Compelling and provoking discussion. Attempting to walk the line myself between writing a great story injected with Christian themes and do it in a subtle yet exciting ways.
Some of my favorite modern fantasy books are: The Lies of Locke Lamora, The First Law series by Joe Abercrombie, and the Wise Man's Fear.
grim
Remember though, media literacy is low now and critical thinking skills are lower, these new authors pumping out these books are also young and I feel like the AUTHOR quality has dropped as well as the reader quality.
I'm writing a novel, and I’ve thought about this a lot. Back in the day, authors relied on raw imagination and weren’t as focused on logic or consistency - maybe because they didn’t care as much, or simply weren’t as analytical. Their stories, full of wonder and adventure, were perfect for kids who didn’t need everything to make sense.
Modern authors, though, are more logical and have access to endless resources that emphasize detailed worldbuilding and coherence. Modern audience got more sophisticated as well. I mean 20-40 years ago, how many readers/viewers even knew things like: character motivation, arcs, tropes, comic relief sidekick, complex characters with flaws, etc?
While this makes stories smarter, it can sometimes strip away that wild, imaginative spark which made older fantasy so magical. So modern books are much better pieces of literature, but not necessarily something that can captivate our minds. Is there a way to balance both?
This is an interesting take! I’ll be thinking about this for days haha. What is your novel about?
What do you recommend for people who like fantasy, but don't care for wars or battles?
The struggle i have with making the themes to obvious and not trusting the reader is that i wholeheartedly agree with you on how powerful subtlety can be, but then i look at how the Star Wars fandom is filled with people who'd happily work for the Empire because they completely missed the themes and messages of the story and now complain that is getting "too political" for having more than two women talk to each other. Can we really say we should trust the reader/viewer when this is the result? I do not blame younger writers for seeing this and going "actually, I don't want to leave any room for people to misinterpret my work"
A constraint on size might be something rather mundane, called... the price of paper. Digital books mitigate it a bit, but many authors (at least in Brazil) find themselves pressured not to write thousand-page bricks due to thick books being too expensive for most people. Many indie writers I know rely on crowdfunding because otherwise, small publishing houses (not the big players in the market) can't tank the cost of printing books few people can afford.
I got a similar feeling when playing Dragon Age: Origins. I was choking up a bit when the final march to Denerim began. I never got the same feeling from any of the other games in the series. There was a mix of dread, hope, pride, and excitement for the battle to come that satisfied an itch I was never able to scratch again in DA2 or Inquisition.
I think a recent series that nailed it was The Stormlight Archives. That and the mistborn series. Both were absolutely fantastic reads from Brandon Sanderson.
I realize I'm in the minority, but I think so many modern fantasy tales double-down on being really explicit, either in sex or profanity. Tolkien's works had neither, and had an air that leaned more towards the goofy than the gritty.
I think that billing willing to be silly or lighthearted makes something more sincere, and as such truer to itself.