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blindness is only a thing of the past, then we'll be in for a big surprise when our critical outlook is also seen as "outdated."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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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 tale 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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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 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."
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.
While I'm a big fan of LOTR, I love the diversity and different flavors of modern fantasy books. There are so many choices and there's something for everyone. Poppy War, She who became the sun, etc etc..i love em all ❤
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.
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.
About the subtelty in books: It's a well known psycological fact that the effects of a realization on someone are much deeper when the person realizes it on its own than when the person is told directly. Think about any great teacher you had in your life and what makes him/her great
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.
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
Personally, I'm the exact opposite. I'm not a big fan of the classical fantasy. Honestly, for me the unexplained doesn't feel like mystery, but marely stuff we do not know. I don't like to spend time on crafting conspiracy theories about the unexplained. It doesn't add to the sense of mystery to me, rather it just feels like "Why? Because it's magic that's why", or alternatively "ok, so this is the part which the author didn't bother to flash out". I prefer to know, not belive. With that said, the explanation can be vague. Like a folktale about an ancient place. Which adds richness to the world. But I can't stand when the explanation is nothing more than "noone knows". Why? Because even if noone knows, the people will come up with explanations, even if they are wrong... And here comes in the picture why I love prequels. Epic tales are often much-much more mundane than how they are told. A folktale is almost always overexaggerated. However, I'm curious about the truth behind the mistery. For me unrevealing the mystery and getting to the ugly truth is what makes it interesting. [Like recently I have read Frieren, which is all about ruining the epic tales of the heroes, and damn it is really good] I think where most fantasy series fails in the later books, is the fact that they do not have enough mystery left in the world or to be precise they do not introduce enough new mysteries to solve. [Note: When I said I like prequels, I'm not talking about the badly written ones you mentioned it the video. Honestly what you did there is a strawmen argument, you used rotten apples as a examples to make a point, use a good one, because there are good ones out there and see if your point still stands... Possibly, but still...]
I totally agree with you. People often say they hate hard magic systems that feel like a science. While some can certainly feel that way, I won’t deny that. However, I like knowing what people are capable of doing with their powers. When someone uses magic to fix everything out of nowhere, I believe it feels reductive to the story
@@rudkelvin8833 Definietly. Also, I think there is an other issue with soft magic systems. Even when the characters are not fixin' the issues with magic, I ask, why? Often it would be the obvious sollution. Instead, it is left unexplained or the explanation feels contrived. I think even a soft magic system needs to have hard limitations or at least there should be a logical reason why would someone willingly avoid usinging their power. [Personally I'm not statisfied with the "a wizzard only uses their power when it is absolutely neccessary". Especially, when people die, because of the inaction, just to teach us some moral lessons]
@@mayorathfoglaltvolt I totally agree! I often dislike when characters can suddenly use powers on the fly without any explanation. A magic system I really like is sympathy from The Kingkiller Chronicle. It’s a very scientific power system that explains exactly what you can do and how you do it. For me, it doesn’t feel any less magical because Kvothe, the main character, understands the magic he’s using, and so do we as readers. My main issue with soft magic systems is when the story’s main character is someone who uses magic, but we don’t know what magic can do or what spells they have access to. You can absolutely have a soft magic system, but you still need to clarify what the main character can do. For example, a book that I think does soft magic well is A Song of Ice and Fire. We don’t really know how magic works in that world, and we don’t have strict rules about what it can do-but it works because the magic isn’t the focus. However, if you’re writing a story where the main character is learning magic, it’s frustrating if the book doesn’t explain what the magic can do or how many spells or powers the character has. One criticism I had about the video was that it used The Lord of the Rings as the standard for fantasy. I don’t think one book can define an entire genre. Tolkien himself said he didn’t put much thought into how magic works in his stories. The Lord of the Rings is a low-magic system, and Tolkien’s storytelling was more like fairy tales in that regard. You can’t just use one book or one author to define the entire fantasy genre.
Y'all... having a "non scientific" magic system does not mean it has no limits or rules. That's your own bias showing with that assumption lol. Edit: an example of more fantasy and less science would be Avatar the Last Airbender imo. It uses generic earthly elements and physical effort as the basis for it's elemental bending. It doesn't try to explain that benders have some fancy organ or bone structure, it gives us some vague spiritual/Chakra explanation that still makes reasonable sense, but takes an awful lot of imagination to still believe.
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).
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.
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?
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 writing into a dumbed down version of what’s possible within the genre. It’s a cranky view, sure, but I’d rather be cranky and critical than bored! 😅
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.
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.😊
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!
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 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.
😅 everything you've mentioned that's sort of "wrong" with modern fantasy is what Sanderson is guilty of. But people clearly LOVE his works... So maybe it's less about what modern fantasy is getting wrong but more about what the readers want 🤔 & enjoy? I mean can we really say these issues are issues if people are eating up these books 🤔? Personally not a fan of most classic fantasy books that readers rave about. I'm of the opinion that books in that time more than now were even more guilty of some of this issues.
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!
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.
"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.
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.
I think older stories are more well written, they were originally for an audience that didn't have the knowledge, opinions and attention span we have today, and they didn't shy away from difficult topics and discussions. And I find it extremely funny when you say one of the many reasons we like LOTR is due to the absence of prequels. Ehm, Silmarilion ,the absolute best prequel ever?😄
Wasn't silmarilion published after his death? I have a vague memory of there being a big debate about if it should even be considered canon becaue Tolkien had chosen to leave it "off the record." But idk how much of that was misinformation tbh.
One problem with allomancy is that the ancients only had iron, copper, silver, gold, tin, lead, antimony, and mercury. They had arsenic in mineral form and as a coproduct of smelting nonferrous ores containing arsenic minerals.
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?
I did notice something similar to anime: The Isekai genre (characters from our world travel to a different world like the book Chronicles of Narnia) was often focused the wonders of the new world and maybe have a story with themes, nowadays those stories are nothing but wish-fulfillment (overpowered characters who collect women for their harems) I think many modern fantasy novels are written by younger authors and they focus on different things like the romance between characters
I personally believe like Hayao Miyazaki does (or did, at least, when he expressed the view in the special features on the old Spirited Away DVD) that art falters when the sole inspirations and references are other pieces of art rather than life and real lived experience. Miyazaki, head of Studio Ghibli, was dealing with a decline in the quality of work produced by younger animators while producing Spirited Away. They were having trouble understanding his direction to animate the dragon's mouth like a dog's. None of the newer staff members ever owned a dog growing up, so they didn't grasp anything he was telling them. He had to pay someone to bring dogs in to be used for reference. This peculiarity eventually proved true across the board. He ended up finding that all the younger animators had only ever replicated the art that impacted them growing up, and that everything they knew had been learned through emulation. There was no raw, personal, first hand lived experience driving their creative processes, so everything ended up being like a xerox of a xerox. Seems reasonable to me we hit that same stage with fiction a while back, and we're still dealing with the consequences. Nobody wants to even go outside anymore, and if they do they're glued to their phone the whole time. Does anyone really believe as many raw and natural experiences are being had anymore among the younger generations? All experience is virtual anymore, and it's going to come back to bite us if it isn't already.
@@MaximilianReyCartwright "Art falters when the sole inspirations and references are other pieces of art rather than life and real lived experience". This formulates my feelings towards art in media right now so much in a way I hadn't realized! It indeed feels like a lot of art at the moment is inspired by other art, instead of life happening. Art has of course always been inspired by other art, just not in the extent that there isn't anything added of life outside the art that inspired, to the point that a lot of artwork (movies, books, songs, etc.) at the moment feels more like fanfiction of other work than it's own thing. Just a great analysis, thanks!
@@ZwarteKonijn Fanfiction is spot on. Perfectly encapsulates the whole idea. We're dealing with a mass fanfiction event. I guess what we really need is fanfiction of life, not of other art. All art has indeed been inspired by other art, but it has always been the particular lived experience of each artist being added to the mix that has produced new and unique iterations. We need that raw injection again. "Touch grass" means so much more than just what it literally says.
All power to authors that want to convey their ideologies through their work but there will be consequences to doing that. If ideologies are put too bluntly, they are risking alienating a part of their audience and sometimes even risk being antagonised by their audience. Just look at JK Rowling. She's in all her right to express her ideologies, but the audience is also on their whole right to disagree. And this comes back to your first point. There should be questions left unanswered. There's a show based on a book called Defending Jacob and it is a very good example of this. The book never tells you what to think but presents two opposing arguments quite strongly and makes you swerve between them.
I guess it depends on why you are writing your books in the first place. if you're just interested in making money, it obviously pays not to alienate people by going against their convictions. On the other hand, the interesting thing is that Tolkien, who was always adamant about not being political in his books was abused by the left and the right alike. Tolkien has been an icon of the Hippie culture, while these days he gets celebrated for example in Italy by the neo-fascists. And as to your point I think it is a major problem that people these days only want to be reassured in their opinion about things and react hostile to any stuff that would challenge their opinions or show things from another perspective. Btw. I think that JK Rowling is a special case because everyone was pretty ok with her books until she opened her mouth and said some pretty stupid things. That's when suddenly everyone went at her throat and tried to find questionable stuff in their books not even shying away from the most outlandish claims just to make her look really bad.
@@Eluarelon I recently watched a video from Veritasium where he explains that there was a study made that shows how there a person has of an understanding of statistics, the more likely they are to interpret data in a correct way, however once you introduce politics into that data the understanding of statistics becomes irrelevant to the interpretation of the data. That's to your point of people wanting to be reassured. I think difficult questions can be explored without being preachy. In the end that is way better than lecturing your audience. And I wholly agree about JK Rowling. Actually I did not keep up with what she said, only heard of it on some video or something like that. To me, HP's universe is very dear and that is because it represents friendship and overcoming difficulties, but also fun and magic. There is no need to know how people take a sh!te in that universe. Again, she should have left it as it was, with some questions unanswered.
@@EarhirX I wonder if that disconnect with "preachy" stuff in fantasy has to with that fantasy (especially since Tolkien) used to be a mostly pure escapist endeavor that didn't even try to be ideological in the first place. Because in Science Fiction (and even more in high literature) that has always been a thing and I don't think the fact per se has ever stirred that much of controversy. To be honest, I am glad that Fantasy finally shows that it can tackle serious and relevant topics even within a fantasy frame and (maybe I read the wrong books), I haven't stumbled about much that I think is preachy at all. The only thing from recent memory where I thought that was too much was Disney's She-Hulk tv show. But to stay with the video's example, I don't find R.F. Kuang preachy at all, she just doesn't shy away from serious topics. Granted the Chinese don't like her stuff, but that just proves that she does something right.
@@Eluarelon yes, it’s exactly that. One of the main complaints in stablished fandoms is “we don’t want your real world politics inserted into our space battles” check out Star Wars, more recently with the acolyte, or how Sabine has always been a Jedi, Marvel’s Falcon and The Winter Soldier’s famous “you need to do better senator”, the recent femstodes from Warhammer 40k, the Snow White adaptation with Zegler. Notice that Star Wars was always political and inspired by real world events, but it wasn’t at the forefront of the story and it was adapted to the universe in which the story takes place. It didn’t try to break the fourth wall to lecture the audience. Recently I read a book called the splendid and the vile, it’s about ww2 and it barely has any politics, focusing more in personal loss and horrors of war. It’s a historical book by the way
@@EarhirX See that's what I don't get. Marvel has always been political, and that scene from Falcon and the Winter Soldier was just the plain truth, not preachy, unless you don't want to get told the truth in your face. I also don't see where there's any problem with Sabine Wren and you need to jump through a lot of ideological hoops to even make a thing out of it. And while the people creating the Acoloyte might have said a divisive thing or two, nothing in the show itself came across as preachy (we can always argue quality, but that's a different thing). Don't know anything about Warhammer 40k, so I won't comment on that, and I'd agree that it's kinda besides the point to put a PoC actress in a role known for "her skin as white as snow", but that's also not that big of a deal. (To me the more irritating thing is how they always cast actresses in the "evil queen" role that are way more beautiful then whoever they cast as Snow White. Don't know what drugs those mirrors take, but it must be the good stuff). In the end, it's not that the stuff is preachy, it's just that the people are extremely narrowminded to the point of stupidity. Which isn't that surprising giving that most of the people taking issue with that are probably gonna vote for that yellow-haired fascist criminal for president today.
Main answer is a lot of modern fantasy are written by cynics (GRR Martin), or post-modernists (Rian Johnson Last Jedi) or modern geeks/pop culture fan without much knowledge of classical works and myths (Sanderson). On the last one. Obviously your story will have more wonder abd universal applicability if you pull from Shakespeare, the Illiad or the Kalavela than if you pull from Spider man or Final Fantasy...
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.
Tolkien was incredible--forget fantasy, I think the Lord of the Rings was the best work of fiction of the 20th century in any genre. Tolkien vs (works from some other time) is not a comparison between eras of writing. Yeah, I was reading fantasy back when Tolkien's work, combined with Conan to some extent, first spawned a genre. I know what most of that stuff was like. Compare modern fantasy with Brak the Barbarian or The Sunset Warrior or the Belgariad and you'll find it looks pretty damn good. I do think there are critiques that can be made of general tendencies in modern fantasy, which are different from critiques that could be made of general tendencies in fantasy in the 70s or 80s, say. So for instance, I'm sick and tired of grimdark, I'm sick and tired of main characters competing to have THE MOST ANGSTY BACKGROUND so they can angst all over the page for the whole book. And I feel like modern fantasy has this tendency to be very . . . professional about worldbuilding, but then not take it seriously at some level. So you've got this carefully crafted world, magic system and whatnot designed to be interesting and have lots of ways to make the plot work good, and characters with cool backgrounds deeply integrated into that world . . . but then they THINK like first-world young humans from the 2020s. Sometimes you feel like that's what makes them the main characters--in some sense the idea is they're important and to be rooted for BECAUSE they are in some psychological way moderns transplanted into the story world. I think it's a bad device and breaks immersion. Maybe part of the problem is that the worldbuilding and magic systems are TOO professional; too many ingredients are in there to be useful, not because the writer had this gut feeling that that's how that world IS. So the writers themselves may not really take their worlds seriously at some level. None of this stuff is universal in modern fantasy, of course, but I do feel it's more characteristic of fantasy now than fantasy back when.
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!
This is what I love about New Weird. Guys like Vandermeer and Mieville hit that sweet spot of mysterious, well thought out, captivating, strange vibes and excellent discipline towards the dynamics of setting, character and plot. My dream is to break into this space with more emphasis on how magical and horrifying both science and philosophy can be. I wanna bridge that gap between escapism and utter sincerity by putting characters in strange worlds and desperate circumstances that are informed by inner conflicts. Something that can play around with the silly, somber and serene.
'Artistry and ideology do not have to stand in opposition.' It's possible, but often books written with some ideology in mind actually lack artistry. I feel the authors do not understand completely the concept of show don't tell. It's not about coming up with the stereotypical situations through which we see some problem, but about actually incorporating the problem into the character's struggle and their learning curve.
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.
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)
For me: Classic fantasy = Christmas Modern fantasy = Halloween I really enjoy Halloween, always look forward to it and get obsessed but... my heart and soul belong to Christmas.
No, it's not that. The genre has clearly shifted into something else, whether you think that is good or bad. Modern Fantasy has more in common with science fiction than it does classical fantasy. If you read a classic sci-fi book, and then a classic fantasy book, and finally read a modern fantasy book, this will become very obvious. Hard-magic systems, technical explanations, a rejection of thematic/mythical causations (e.g. the eagles arrive when the world is ready for the eagles to arrive), is just the tip of the iceberg here.
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.
The value of being subtle with themes is a psychological trick. People value personal insight more than anything, and if you give them the building blocks for your message but not the instructions, the reader will be more satisfied with the personal revelation. Being overt, especially with obvious themes like bad is bad or charity is good, really make the reader feel like the author sees them as stupid. It also calls into question skills of the writer. Its like if someone tells you a person has died, it doesn't hit nearly as hard as if you witness it happen. I'm not saying that overtness is bad art, but it looses that intimacy get from reading something with a subtle message that you get to integrate within yourself organically.
I think a good example for a "somewhat hard magic system" in a more classical story comes from Harry Harrisons Eden-Trilogy. The saurisian people do use a form of technology, that looks like something unbelievably otherworldly to the human races. The technology is rooted in genetical manipulation of diffrent living things and the author even has an appendix explaining certain inventions, showing a set of rules and boundaries to it. Over the course of the first book the reader (as well as the main character) learns about this system, how it works and what it can and can't do. But there is still room for believable new mechanisms to be invented (and they are over the course of the books), pushing the boundaries further and further. The reader also never learns how the technology was discoverd, just how it is rooted in saurisian philosophy (which could somehow be viewd as a soft magic system as well). The thing here is, that the technology system feels both familiar and strange at the same time. And this strangeness is what makes it FEEL magical. It helps that the majority of characters in the books aren't well acquinted with the technology themselves (including the saurisians!). On the other hand, Thunderbolt Fantasy (a taiwanese puppet show) has a great soft magic system plus an outstanding writing that as of this point doesn't show any signs of Deus Ex Machina. Do we know how the swords work? For the most part, no. Do we know why they are there? Historically, yes, from a magic standpoint, no. Do we know how the combat magic works? No. Absolutly not. We don't even know anything meaningful about the main characters. ALL of them. And yet none of the three season finales up to date ended with a Deus Ex Machina (even thou both the swords and the magic of one of the MCs would lend itself heavily to it). It might look like it at one point, but it's all so deeply rooted in the story that you can actually rewatch the series and SEE the buildup. It's great. It might not be a book, but it's the best modern fantasy I've come across in the last 10 years. I love it. I will praise it wherever I go. You definitly should watch it.
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).
On theme, I have found two schools of thought 1: Make sure to state the theme early. Ideally before the Call to Adventure but definitely before Crossing the Threshold. 2: Just write your story and don't worry about the theme. Theme will emerge on its own when it feels ready. I tend to agree with the second approach, as the first is an open invite to hamfistedly bludgeoning your readers with Aessop preachings. As for hard and soft magic, I believe, a middleground is needed. If it is too soft, Deus Ex Machina is near inevitable, if it's too hard, you might as well write Sci-Fi. There needs to be a sense of wonder and unknown, but it needs to be reliable enough to not become a convenient contrivance. But no matter how hard or soft, the writer needs to know more than the books reveal. No matter how soft the magic system appears in the books, the writer needs to know at the very least what determines if somebody can learn magic; and if the magic system is hard to the point of a white paper on advanced theoretical physics, the writer needs to know the molecular weight of a Thaum and the mathematical equasion that calculates how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, even if it is never mentioned in the books. Ubi Sunt is kinda why I dislike Elves and other "eternal" races. There is no mystery, no legends and mythology, in the distant past if some random guy across the bar was there. "At last, we found the lost temple of Draneth. Nobody has been here since the dark ages. To wonder, if the stones could talk, what stories they'd tell." "Ah, yes, indeed. I remember well. Over there in that corner, was the apple cart where I proposed to my teenage sweetheart."
You stated you might explore LitRPG. I found the genre early and I really enjoyed it. Today I feel like it’s time is passing. It was exciting and new when it first appeared. Lately it seems authors are struggling to find new story lines. They are all becoming cookie cutter rehash. Exactly what you mentioned in your video concerning Tolkien. I would encourage you to read a few and explore the genre. However, I recommend you research and identify the most loved books in the genre and stick with those. Lately there have been a lot of bad LitRPG being thrown at us. Too many jumping on the bandwagon trying to turn a quick buck. At least that is how it feels to me.
It's a bit of a weird notion that because one trilogy of fantasy movies (an adaptation of THE classic of the genre) about 20 years ago was extremely good and aged well, all fantasy (movies, books, games, etc.) since then somehow is bad. That aside, yes over-explanation is a problem; but the same goes for purposefully misleading the reader or viewer.
I wouldn't define classic fantasy vs. modern fantasy by the publishing date, but by the notion that modern fantasy is more tied up in time-dependent societal themes, while classic fantasy is often timeless. What we are looking for in fantasy is hard to find nowadays, outside of the tie-in fantasy novels, like Warhammer, that are often looked down upon. We don’t like explicit themes or messages and long for fantasy that is just immersive and escapist, without shoving moral lessons down our throats. So, we think nothing will ever come close to what Tolkien did. He is still the most inspiring fantasy author this day. We don’t have to copy-paste his worldbuilding and then insert orcs and elves to write compelling fantasy. But the heart and soul that you can find in his novels should remain the engine that drives us, even as new fantasy authors.
I disagree wholeheartedly with the idea that writers shouldn't shy away from bludgeoning their readers with themes. First because, yes, it's a less rewarding experience. But the bigger issue is that it drives to the heart of this silly, silly idea people have that a writer's writing is somehow for them. You can make that argument right up until publication. But once it's published? It's meant for the reader. Art is communication. So if your art isn't communicating well, or you're doing the equivalent of lecturing your reader instead of having a conversation with them, your story will be empty and it will die in the ash heap of history. I can't stand overt themes. It's a mark of author pretension, and narcissism in many cases if I'll be honest. I've worked with a lot of aspiring writers, and this lack of ability to put yourself in your reader's shoes is absolutely the root cause of why this genre feels so hollow anymore. Rant over, sorry lol but this absolutely drives me up the wall.
I don't remember what author said that once you put your book out there, it is no longer your book but the readers' and that as and author you cannot expect your very narrow and specific point to be interpreted the same by every reader being that everyone has different backgrounds
@@EarhirX More things can be true at once. Tolkien said in a foreword that he wrote for himself (and had to be dragged into initially publishing The Hobbit). This doesn't stop being true just because the story is out there. Sure, you can't control the public conversation, but you still wrote for yourself and that will always be true. I agree you can't expect readers to take a specific point, but that is also not what a theme is. Themes are, by their nature, the very opposite of specific. Although themes can persuade (in the abstract), they are not arguments like a specific point would be.
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.. 😊
Hard magic systems nowadays are often also sort of the result of fantasy games stemming from Dungeons and Dragons, because to use magic in a game there need to be very specific rules to it. Previously however magic was something deeply unexplainable.
A big problem I see is the infection of ideas from role playing games. D&D came out in the mid 70s, AD&D in the early 80s and that's when RPGs got big. Those games (and I love them, make no mistake) are all number fests: levels, scores for attributes, gold counts, +1 sword, +3 axe, spell levels, etc... "My power is greater than your power!" We can see some of this in fantasy fiction. As I recall (only seen the movies) Harry Potter wins because he had the Master Wand (or whatever it was called) and thus could beat anyone. I love Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books but Vlad has access to no less than 3 different types of magic and thus can beat almost anyone. I read the third Wheel of Time book (Dragon Reborn) earlier in the year and Rand now has the super-duper sword (forget what it is called) and thus can pretty well win against anyone. (I'm guessing here, haven't read the others yet.) There's nothing like that in older fantasy as I recall, although there may be exceptions. You don't see Gandalf dropping his +1 sword because he found a +3. Another problem is unearned abilities. Characters are suddenly good at something with little to no training. Again, in Dragon Reborn, there's a chapter where Mat, still very weak and tired, beats up two guys using a staff that we've never seen him use before. He can because the author wants him to. In Name of the Wind Kvoth learns more magic in half a semester than others do in a whole, then goes on to teach the teachers. He's just so perfect. I haven't read it but I've heard in the second book, at age 16, he becomes a king of sex. In Lord of the Rings you don't see Frodo or Sam learning to sword fight so well that they can easily beat 20 orcs.
Bro... I started to see your video only to see something... But I found your talk very interesting. I want to be a fantasy writer, promise thought on this video of yours...
Hmm, a simple aspect would also be, including your age, we all have grown up with all the cliches of fantasy. I'd say, given my age, already the late eighties and nineties had lots of terrible cheap dross copying Tolkien, with dark lords everywhere, prophecies and flying dragons. Also fantasy is full of coming of age stories. You're an adult now and thus the magic of coming of age stories wears of. You want more adult stuff. If you want real new fantasy you'd need to bring a whole new universe, with barely enough cliché to understand we're in the fantasy universe.
Peter Higgins' novel 'Dragon Heart' is full of ubi sunt. It's an under-appreciated gem. Supposed to be the first in a series, but it's been a few years, and no sign of a sequel. I still recommend it as being something truly different and wonderful. The world is being invaded by another, the world is dying, everywhere are relics and memories of ages past. The story is grim and dark beyond even most grimdark, and yet the central characters are people you grow to love and root for, you hold out hope against hope that they will somehow be alright, even as the world darkens and grows more desperate. And then, there is the reason why the novel is titled 'Dragon Heart', which is a mistake, as it has nothing to do with the movie of the name: though a dragon dies, its heart does not, and this is how characters from long ages past are linked to the protagonists of the story.
I think part of the problem is that when anyone tries, they get bombarded by comments from ten thousand superficial nerds saying "Yeah, that was a good story, when Tolkien wrote it."
This video is a massive breath of fresh air. I've been missing the very things you describe--wonder, a sense of antiquity, and "softer" magic systems--and I'm using all of them in my current WIP, first in a new series inspired by Bronze Age Europe and the operas of Wagner.
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
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...
Maybe the problem isn't themes being too obvious. Maybe it's because the presentation being too boring. Look at Arcane. Its theme is pretty in-your-face, but the presentation is interesting and the story works wonderfully. The main theme is super obvious, and it still has tons of nuanced themes to be discovered.
Nah. It's just harder to find quality stories in this swamped genre. Fantasy has boomed these last two decades because it's far easier to publish novels( Ebooks) these days. Many modern writers still copy the same old tropes early writers used . Also. almost every modern writer starts a series these days. One off books are rare. So sadly we often have a decent story being stretched out over multiple books .
My problem with NK Jemisin's The City We Became was that the message was too on the nose for my liking. It's so different to the Fifth Season where everything is so much more mysterious and subtle. I try to stay away from books where the message is obvious or too black and white. I actually think that RF Kuang handled conflicting messages super well in Yellowface. While the main character had very strong opinions and views, there was a level of irony that made it clear that things were more complex than they seemed.
"Classic fantasy is too slow paced and modern ones are faster, thiner etc" I wonder if it has something to do with the booktube/booktok thing. It's a challenge to read 30+ books a month (and not to remember what the story was about) Quantitiy above quality🤔
@@libraryofavikingnot only our attention spans are changing, but also the writers'. Maybe they write fast paced stories because they themselves get bored of the slow paced ones. Writers are readers that write, they have changed in the same way we did.
This is why I dislike most modern fantasy novels. They spend so much time focusing on cool flashy fight scenes and intricate magic systems instead of actually telling a good story, building a deep world and developing interesting complex characters.
Great video, nails the issue I have with a lot of modern stuff. Leave the exhaustive detail for the inevitable TTRPG. I wasn't aware of LitRPG at all but I've run into the concept in anime and it's almost always terribly lazy. I also find books that basically proselytize annoying. Some of my favourite fantasy series like Micheal Scott Rohans Winter of the World and KJ Parker's Fencer and Engineer trilogies just feel so different from a lot of other fantasy...
I am not sure if length has as much bearing on this as how the story is paced and how the story's time is used. The Last Unicorn very much strikes me as a story in the same vein as the older stories you are talking about in this video, and it is incredibly short, but it spends most of its time in the still moments between plot points, not rushing around trying to give us constant action, twists, and drama. I think in many of the older stories, there simply isn't as much "plot" complexity, and even if there is, they simply spent less time going through its motions, and far more engaging with the characters in the moments between.
Did you enjoy this video? Check out my most recent commentary video here:
ua-cam.com/video/-As51oC1JG8/v-deo.htmlsi=rX9kRXAViFeoGJur
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
"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 tale 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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."
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.
While I'm a big fan of LOTR, I love the diversity and different flavors of modern fantasy books. There are so many choices and there's something for everyone. Poppy War, She who became the sun, etc etc..i love em all ❤
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.
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.
About the subtelty in books: It's a well known psycological fact that the effects of a realization on someone are much deeper when the person realizes it on its own than when the person is told directly. Think about any great teacher you had in your life and what makes him/her great
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.
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
Personally, I'm the exact opposite. I'm not a big fan of the classical fantasy. Honestly, for me the unexplained doesn't feel like mystery, but marely stuff we do not know. I don't like to spend time on crafting conspiracy theories about the unexplained. It doesn't add to the sense of mystery to me, rather it just feels like "Why? Because it's magic that's why", or alternatively "ok, so this is the part which the author didn't bother to flash out". I prefer to know, not belive.
With that said, the explanation can be vague. Like a folktale about an ancient place. Which adds richness to the world. But I can't stand when the explanation is nothing more than "noone knows". Why? Because even if noone knows, the people will come up with explanations, even if they are wrong... And here comes in the picture why I love prequels. Epic tales are often much-much more mundane than how they are told. A folktale is almost always overexaggerated. However, I'm curious about the truth behind the mistery. For me unrevealing the mystery and getting to the ugly truth is what makes it interesting. [Like recently I have read Frieren, which is all about ruining the epic tales of the heroes, and damn it is really good]
I think where most fantasy series fails in the later books, is the fact that they do not have enough mystery left in the world or to be precise they do not introduce enough new mysteries to solve.
[Note: When I said I like prequels, I'm not talking about the badly written ones you mentioned it the video. Honestly what you did there is a strawmen argument, you used rotten apples as a examples to make a point, use a good one, because there are good ones out there and see if your point still stands... Possibly, but still...]
I totally agree with you. People often say they hate hard magic systems that feel like a science. While some can certainly feel that way, I won’t deny that. However, I like knowing what people are capable of doing with their powers. When someone uses magic to fix everything out of nowhere, I believe it feels reductive to the story
@@rudkelvin8833 Definietly. Also, I think there is an other issue with soft magic systems. Even when the characters are not fixin' the issues with magic, I ask, why? Often it would be the obvious sollution. Instead, it is left unexplained or the explanation feels contrived.
I think even a soft magic system needs to have hard limitations or at least there should be a logical reason why would someone willingly avoid usinging their power. [Personally I'm not statisfied with the "a wizzard only uses their power when it is absolutely neccessary". Especially, when people die, because of the inaction, just to teach us some moral lessons]
@@mayorathfoglaltvolt I totally agree! I often dislike when characters can suddenly use powers on the fly without any explanation. A magic system I really like is sympathy from The Kingkiller Chronicle. It’s a very scientific power system that explains exactly what you can do and how you do it. For me, it doesn’t feel any less magical because Kvothe, the main character, understands the magic he’s using, and so do we as readers.
My main issue with soft magic systems is when the story’s main character is someone who uses magic, but we don’t know what magic can do or what spells they have access to. You can absolutely have a soft magic system, but you still need to clarify what the main character can do.
For example, a book that I think does soft magic well is A Song of Ice and Fire. We don’t really know how magic works in that world, and we don’t have strict rules about what it can do-but it works because the magic isn’t the focus. However, if you’re writing a story where the main character is learning magic, it’s frustrating if the book doesn’t explain what the magic can do or how many spells or powers the character has.
One criticism I had about the video was that it used The Lord of the Rings as the standard for fantasy. I don’t think one book can define an entire genre. Tolkien himself said he didn’t put much thought into how magic works in his stories. The Lord of the Rings is a low-magic system, and Tolkien’s storytelling was more like fairy tales in that regard. You can’t just use one book or one author to define the entire fantasy genre.
Completely agree
Y'all... having a "non scientific" magic system does not mean it has no limits or rules. That's your own bias showing with that assumption lol.
Edit: an example of more fantasy and less science would be Avatar the Last Airbender imo. It uses generic earthly elements and physical effort as the basis for it's elemental bending. It doesn't try to explain that benders have some fancy organ or bone structure, it gives us some vague spiritual/Chakra explanation that still makes reasonable sense, but takes an awful lot of imagination to still believe.
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).
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.
Modern fantasy has lost "romanticism".
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.
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?
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 writing into a dumbed down version of what’s possible within the genre. It’s a cranky view, sure, but I’d rather be cranky and critical than bored! 😅
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!
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!
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!
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 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!
😅 everything you've mentioned that's sort of "wrong" with modern fantasy is what Sanderson is guilty of.
But people clearly LOVE his works...
So maybe it's less about what modern fantasy is getting wrong but more about what the readers want 🤔 & enjoy?
I mean can we really say these issues are issues if people are eating up these books 🤔?
Personally not a fan of most classic fantasy books that readers rave about. I'm of the opinion that books in that time more than now were even more guilty of some of this issues.
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!
I did a 180 on Bombadil. Didn't get it as a kid, but became one of my favorite parts as an adult.
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.
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...
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.
I think older stories are more well written, they were originally for an audience that didn't have the knowledge, opinions and attention span we have today, and they didn't shy away from difficult topics and discussions. And I find it extremely funny when you say one of the many reasons we like LOTR is due to the absence of prequels. Ehm, Silmarilion ,the absolute best prequel ever?😄
Wasn't silmarilion published after his death? I have a vague memory of there being a big debate about if it should even be considered canon becaue Tolkien had chosen to leave it "off the record." But idk how much of that was misinformation tbh.
One problem with allomancy is that the ancients only had iron, copper, silver, gold, tin, lead, antimony, and mercury. They had arsenic in mineral form and as a coproduct of smelting nonferrous ores containing arsenic minerals.
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?
So glad you mentioned the Fool. I was in the middle of commenting about it when you switched over to it. Amber, of course, is the same ;)
I did notice something similar to anime: The Isekai genre (characters from our world travel to a different world like the book Chronicles of Narnia) was often focused the wonders of the new world and maybe have a story with themes, nowadays those stories are nothing but wish-fulfillment (overpowered characters who collect women for their harems)
I think many modern fantasy novels are written by younger authors and they focus on different things like the romance between characters
I personally believe like Hayao Miyazaki does (or did, at least, when he expressed the view in the special features on the old Spirited Away DVD) that art falters when the sole inspirations and references are other pieces of art rather than life and real lived experience.
Miyazaki, head of Studio Ghibli, was dealing with a decline in the quality of work produced by younger animators while producing Spirited Away. They were having trouble understanding his direction to animate the dragon's mouth like a dog's. None of the newer staff members ever owned a dog growing up, so they didn't grasp anything he was telling them. He had to pay someone to bring dogs in to be used for reference.
This peculiarity eventually proved true across the board. He ended up finding that all the younger animators had only ever replicated the art that impacted them growing up, and that everything they knew had been learned through emulation. There was no raw, personal, first hand lived experience driving their creative processes, so everything ended up being like a xerox of a xerox.
Seems reasonable to me we hit that same stage with fiction a while back, and we're still dealing with the consequences. Nobody wants to even go outside anymore, and if they do they're glued to their phone the whole time. Does anyone really believe as many raw and natural experiences are being had anymore among the younger generations? All experience is virtual anymore, and it's going to come back to bite us if it isn't already.
@@MaximilianReyCartwright
"Art falters when the sole inspirations and references are other pieces of art rather than life and real lived experience".
This formulates my feelings towards art in media right now so much in a way I hadn't realized!
It indeed feels like a lot of art at the moment is inspired by other art, instead of life happening. Art has of course always been inspired by other art, just not in the extent that there isn't anything added of life outside the art that inspired, to the point that a lot of artwork (movies, books, songs, etc.) at the moment feels more like fanfiction of other work than it's own thing.
Just a great analysis, thanks!
@@ZwarteKonijn Fanfiction is spot on. Perfectly encapsulates the whole idea. We're dealing with a mass fanfiction event. I guess what we really need is fanfiction of life, not of other art. All art has indeed been inspired by other art, but it has always been the particular lived experience of each artist being added to the mix that has produced new and unique iterations. We need that raw injection again. "Touch grass" means so much more than just what it literally says.
Hello, I’m Cecilia. It’s lovely to meet you!
Silo (Wool) is a beautiful example of how to write modern "fantasy".
The elements in the story are classical "fantasy"
All power to authors that want to convey their ideologies through their work but there will be consequences to doing that. If ideologies are put too bluntly, they are risking alienating a part of their audience and sometimes even risk being antagonised by their audience. Just look at JK Rowling. She's in all her right to express her ideologies, but the audience is also on their whole right to disagree.
And this comes back to your first point. There should be questions left unanswered.
There's a show based on a book called Defending Jacob and it is a very good example of this. The book never tells you what to think but presents two opposing arguments quite strongly and makes you swerve between them.
I guess it depends on why you are writing your books in the first place. if you're just interested in making money, it obviously pays not to alienate people by going against their convictions. On the other hand, the interesting thing is that Tolkien, who was always adamant about not being political in his books was abused by the left and the right alike. Tolkien has been an icon of the Hippie culture, while these days he gets celebrated for example in Italy by the neo-fascists. And as to your point I think it is a major problem that people these days only want to be reassured in their opinion about things and react hostile to any stuff that would challenge their opinions or show things from another perspective.
Btw. I think that JK Rowling is a special case because everyone was pretty ok with her books until she opened her mouth and said some pretty stupid things. That's when suddenly everyone went at her throat and tried to find questionable stuff in their books not even shying away from the most outlandish claims just to make her look really bad.
@@Eluarelon I recently watched a video from Veritasium where he explains that there was a study made that shows how there a person has of an understanding of statistics, the more likely they are to interpret data in a correct way, however once you introduce politics into that data the understanding of statistics becomes irrelevant to the interpretation of the data. That's to your point of people wanting to be reassured.
I think difficult questions can be explored without being preachy. In the end that is way better than lecturing your audience.
And I wholly agree about JK Rowling. Actually I did not keep up with what she said, only heard of it on some video or something like that. To me, HP's universe is very dear and that is because it represents friendship and overcoming difficulties, but also fun and magic. There is no need to know how people take a sh!te in that universe. Again, she should have left it as it was, with some questions unanswered.
@@EarhirX I wonder if that disconnect with "preachy" stuff in fantasy has to with that fantasy (especially since Tolkien) used to be a mostly pure escapist endeavor that didn't even try to be ideological in the first place. Because in Science Fiction (and even more in high literature) that has always been a thing and I don't think the fact per se has ever stirred that much of controversy. To be honest, I am glad that Fantasy finally shows that it can tackle serious and relevant topics even within a fantasy frame and (maybe I read the wrong books), I haven't stumbled about much that I think is preachy at all. The only thing from recent memory where I thought that was too much was Disney's She-Hulk tv show. But to stay with the video's example, I don't find R.F. Kuang preachy at all, she just doesn't shy away from serious topics. Granted the Chinese don't like her stuff, but that just proves that she does something right.
@@Eluarelon yes, it’s exactly that. One of the main complaints in stablished fandoms is “we don’t want your real world politics inserted into our space battles” check out Star Wars, more recently with the acolyte, or how Sabine has always been a Jedi, Marvel’s Falcon and The Winter Soldier’s famous “you need to do better senator”, the recent femstodes from Warhammer 40k, the Snow White adaptation with Zegler.
Notice that Star Wars was always political and inspired by real world events, but it wasn’t at the forefront of the story and it was adapted to the universe in which the story takes place. It didn’t try to break the fourth wall to lecture the audience.
Recently I read a book called the splendid and the vile, it’s about ww2 and it barely has any politics, focusing more in personal loss and horrors of war. It’s a historical book by the way
@@EarhirX See that's what I don't get. Marvel has always been political, and that scene from Falcon and the Winter Soldier was just the plain truth, not preachy, unless you don't want to get told the truth in your face. I also don't see where there's any problem with Sabine Wren and you need to jump through a lot of ideological hoops to even make a thing out of it. And while the people creating the Acoloyte might have said a divisive thing or two, nothing in the show itself came across as preachy (we can always argue quality, but that's a different thing). Don't know anything about Warhammer 40k, so I won't comment on that, and I'd agree that it's kinda besides the point to put a PoC actress in a role known for "her skin as white as snow", but that's also not that big of a deal. (To me the more irritating thing is how they always cast actresses in the "evil queen" role that are way more beautiful then whoever they cast as Snow White. Don't know what drugs those mirrors take, but it must be the good stuff).
In the end, it's not that the stuff is preachy, it's just that the people are extremely narrowminded to the point of stupidity. Which isn't that surprising giving that most of the people taking issue with that are probably gonna vote for that yellow-haired fascist criminal for president today.
Main answer is a lot of
modern fantasy are written by cynics (GRR Martin), or post-modernists (Rian Johnson Last Jedi) or modern geeks/pop culture fan without much knowledge of classical works and myths (Sanderson).
On the last one. Obviously your story will have more wonder abd universal applicability if you pull from Shakespeare, the Illiad or the Kalavela than if you pull from Spider man or Final Fantasy...
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.
Tolkien was incredible--forget fantasy, I think the Lord of the Rings was the best work of fiction of the 20th century in any genre. Tolkien vs (works from some other time) is not a comparison between eras of writing. Yeah, I was reading fantasy back when Tolkien's work, combined with Conan to some extent, first spawned a genre. I know what most of that stuff was like. Compare modern fantasy with Brak the Barbarian or The Sunset Warrior or the Belgariad and you'll find it looks pretty damn good.
I do think there are critiques that can be made of general tendencies in modern fantasy, which are different from critiques that could be made of general tendencies in fantasy in the 70s or 80s, say. So for instance, I'm sick and tired of grimdark, I'm sick and tired of main characters competing to have THE MOST ANGSTY BACKGROUND so they can angst all over the page for the whole book. And I feel like modern fantasy has this tendency to be very . . . professional about worldbuilding, but then not take it seriously at some level. So you've got this carefully crafted world, magic system and whatnot designed to be interesting and have lots of ways to make the plot work good, and characters with cool backgrounds deeply integrated into that world . . . but then they THINK like first-world young humans from the 2020s. Sometimes you feel like that's what makes them the main characters--in some sense the idea is they're important and to be rooted for BECAUSE they are in some psychological way moderns transplanted into the story world. I think it's a bad device and breaks immersion. Maybe part of the problem is that the worldbuilding and magic systems are TOO professional; too many ingredients are in there to be useful, not because the writer had this gut feeling that that's how that world IS. So the writers themselves may not really take their worlds seriously at some level. None of this stuff is universal in modern fantasy, of course, but I do feel it's more characteristic of fantasy now than fantasy back when.
6:06 - This is the essence of Art - making the reader the author
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!
This is what I love about New Weird. Guys like Vandermeer and Mieville hit that sweet spot of mysterious, well thought out, captivating, strange vibes and excellent discipline towards the dynamics of setting, character and plot. My dream is to break into this space with more emphasis on how magical and horrifying both science and philosophy can be. I wanna bridge that gap between escapism and utter sincerity by putting characters in strange worlds and desperate circumstances that are informed by inner conflicts. Something that can play around with the silly, somber and serene.
'Artistry and ideology do not have to stand in opposition.'
It's possible, but often books written with some ideology in mind actually lack artistry. I feel the authors do not understand completely the concept of show don't tell. It's not about coming up with the stereotypical situations through which we see some problem, but about actually incorporating the problem into the character's struggle and their learning curve.
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
Bookborn is right. And Andy Smith “Is good but not great” review for Way of Kings is the best example.
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)
For me:
Classic fantasy = Christmas
Modern fantasy = Halloween
I really enjoy Halloween, always look forward to it and get obsessed but... my heart and soul belong to Christmas.
You ANSWERed your own question: "why isn't fantasy like this anymore? When I WAS YOUNGER I was completely mesmerized by stories like..."
No, it's not that. The genre has clearly shifted into something else, whether you think that is good or bad. Modern Fantasy has more in common with science fiction than it does classical fantasy. If you read a classic sci-fi book, and then a classic fantasy book, and finally read a modern fantasy book, this will become very obvious. Hard-magic systems, technical explanations, a rejection of thematic/mythical causations (e.g. the eagles arrive when the world is ready for the eagles to arrive), is just the tip of the iceberg here.
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.
The value of being subtle with themes is a psychological trick. People value personal insight more than anything, and if you give them the building blocks for your message but not the instructions, the reader will be more satisfied with the personal revelation. Being overt, especially with obvious themes like bad is bad or charity is good, really make the reader feel like the author sees them as stupid. It also calls into question skills of the writer. Its like if someone tells you a person has died, it doesn't hit nearly as hard as if you witness it happen. I'm not saying that overtness is bad art, but it looses that intimacy get from reading something with a subtle message that you get to integrate within yourself organically.
Do you know the manga/anime Frieren? I thing it can relate to many of the things that you mention in the video
I think a good example for a "somewhat hard magic system" in a more classical story comes from Harry Harrisons Eden-Trilogy. The saurisian people do use a form of technology, that looks like something unbelievably otherworldly to the human races. The technology is rooted in genetical manipulation of diffrent living things and the author even has an appendix explaining certain inventions, showing a set of rules and boundaries to it. Over the course of the first book the reader (as well as the main character) learns about this system, how it works and what it can and can't do. But there is still room for believable new mechanisms to be invented (and they are over the course of the books), pushing the boundaries further and further. The reader also never learns how the technology was discoverd, just how it is rooted in saurisian philosophy (which could somehow be viewd as a soft magic system as well). The thing here is, that the technology system feels both familiar and strange at the same time. And this strangeness is what makes it FEEL magical. It helps that the majority of characters in the books aren't well acquinted with the technology themselves (including the saurisians!).
On the other hand, Thunderbolt Fantasy (a taiwanese puppet show) has a great soft magic system plus an outstanding writing that as of this point doesn't show any signs of Deus Ex Machina. Do we know how the swords work? For the most part, no. Do we know why they are there? Historically, yes, from a magic standpoint, no. Do we know how the combat magic works? No. Absolutly not. We don't even know anything meaningful about the main characters. ALL of them. And yet none of the three season finales up to date ended with a Deus Ex Machina (even thou both the swords and the magic of one of the MCs would lend itself heavily to it). It might look like it at one point, but it's all so deeply rooted in the story that you can actually rewatch the series and SEE the buildup. It's great. It might not be a book, but it's the best modern fantasy I've come across in the last 10 years. I love it. I will praise it wherever I go. You definitly should watch it.
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).
On theme, I have found two schools of thought
1: Make sure to state the theme early. Ideally before the Call to Adventure but definitely before Crossing the Threshold.
2: Just write your story and don't worry about the theme. Theme will emerge on its own when it feels ready.
I tend to agree with the second approach, as the first is an open invite to hamfistedly bludgeoning your readers with Aessop preachings.
As for hard and soft magic, I believe, a middleground is needed. If it is too soft, Deus Ex Machina is near inevitable, if it's too hard, you might as well write Sci-Fi. There needs to be a sense of wonder and unknown, but it needs to be reliable enough to not become a convenient contrivance. But no matter how hard or soft, the writer needs to know more than the books reveal. No matter how soft the magic system appears in the books, the writer needs to know at the very least what determines if somebody can learn magic; and if the magic system is hard to the point of a white paper on advanced theoretical physics, the writer needs to know the molecular weight of a Thaum and the mathematical equasion that calculates how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, even if it is never mentioned in the books.
Ubi Sunt is kinda why I dislike Elves and other "eternal" races. There is no mystery, no legends and mythology, in the distant past if some random guy across the bar was there.
"At last, we found the lost temple of Draneth. Nobody has been here since the dark ages. To wonder, if the stones could talk, what stories they'd tell."
"Ah, yes, indeed. I remember well. Over there in that corner, was the apple cart where I proposed to my teenage sweetheart."
You stated you might explore LitRPG. I found the genre early and I really enjoyed it. Today I feel like it’s time is passing. It was exciting and new when it first appeared. Lately it seems authors are struggling to find new story lines. They are all becoming cookie cutter rehash. Exactly what you mentioned in your video concerning Tolkien.
I would encourage you to read a few and explore the genre. However, I recommend you research and identify the most loved books in the genre and stick with those. Lately there have been a lot of bad LitRPG being thrown at us. Too many jumping on the bandwagon trying to turn a quick buck. At least that is how it feels to me.
It's a bit of a weird notion that because one trilogy of fantasy movies (an adaptation of THE classic of the genre) about 20 years ago was extremely good and aged well, all fantasy (movies, books, games, etc.) since then somehow is bad. That aside, yes over-explanation is a problem; but the same goes for purposefully misleading the reader or viewer.
I wouldn't define classic fantasy vs. modern fantasy by the publishing date, but by the notion that modern fantasy is more tied up in time-dependent societal themes, while classic fantasy is often timeless. What we are looking for in fantasy is hard to find nowadays, outside of the tie-in fantasy novels, like Warhammer, that are often looked down upon. We don’t like explicit themes or messages and long for fantasy that is just immersive and escapist, without shoving moral lessons down our throats.
So, we think nothing will ever come close to what Tolkien did. He is still the most inspiring fantasy author this day. We don’t have to copy-paste his worldbuilding and then insert orcs and elves to write compelling fantasy. But the heart and soul that you can find in his novels should remain the engine that drives us, even as new fantasy authors.
Love me some Gotrek and Felix. I miss Warhammer Fantasy.
I disagree wholeheartedly with the idea that writers shouldn't shy away from bludgeoning their readers with themes. First because, yes, it's a less rewarding experience. But the bigger issue is that it drives to the heart of this silly, silly idea people have that a writer's writing is somehow for them. You can make that argument right up until publication. But once it's published? It's meant for the reader. Art is communication. So if your art isn't communicating well, or you're doing the equivalent of lecturing your reader instead of having a conversation with them, your story will be empty and it will die in the ash heap of history. I can't stand overt themes. It's a mark of author pretension, and narcissism in many cases if I'll be honest. I've worked with a lot of aspiring writers, and this lack of ability to put yourself in your reader's shoes is absolutely the root cause of why this genre feels so hollow anymore. Rant over, sorry lol but this absolutely drives me up the wall.
I don't remember what author said that once you put your book out there, it is no longer your book but the readers' and that as and author you cannot expect your very narrow and specific point to be interpreted the same by every reader being that everyone has different backgrounds
@@EarhirX More things can be true at once. Tolkien said in a foreword that he wrote for himself (and had to be dragged into initially publishing The Hobbit). This doesn't stop being true just because the story is out there. Sure, you can't control the public conversation, but you still wrote for yourself and that will always be true. I agree you can't expect readers to take a specific point, but that is also not what a theme is. Themes are, by their nature, the very opposite of specific. Although themes can persuade (in the abstract), they are not arguments like a specific point would be.
While I love hard magic, my favorite storytellers are very much soft magic - Tolkein, Pratchett, Miyazaki, McKillip, and more.
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..
😊
Fire video mate
Thank you, Wera!
As the Elf leaves Middle Earth to the Second Born, Man, the classic fantasy cedes shelf space to the modern fantasy.
Hard magic systems nowadays are often also sort of the result of fantasy games stemming from Dungeons and Dragons, because to use magic in a game there need to be very specific rules to it.
Previously however magic was something deeply unexplainable.
A big problem I see is the infection of ideas from role playing games. D&D came out in the mid 70s, AD&D in the early 80s and that's when RPGs got big. Those games (and I love them, make no mistake) are all number fests: levels, scores for attributes, gold counts, +1 sword, +3 axe, spell levels, etc... "My power is greater than your power!" We can see some of this in fantasy fiction. As I recall (only seen the movies) Harry Potter wins because he had the Master Wand (or whatever it was called) and thus could beat anyone. I love Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books but Vlad has access to no less than 3 different types of magic and thus can beat almost anyone. I read the third Wheel of Time book (Dragon Reborn) earlier in the year and Rand now has the super-duper sword (forget what it is called) and thus can pretty well win against anyone. (I'm guessing here, haven't read the others yet.) There's nothing like that in older fantasy as I recall, although there may be exceptions. You don't see Gandalf dropping his +1 sword because he found a +3.
Another problem is unearned abilities. Characters are suddenly good at something with little to no training. Again, in Dragon Reborn, there's a chapter where Mat, still very weak and tired, beats up two guys using a staff that we've never seen him use before. He can because the author wants him to. In Name of the Wind Kvoth learns more magic in half a semester than others do in a whole, then goes on to teach the teachers. He's just so perfect. I haven't read it but I've heard in the second book, at age 16, he becomes a king of sex. In Lord of the Rings you don't see Frodo or Sam learning to sword fight so well that they can easily beat 20 orcs.
Bro... I started to see your video only to see something... But I found your talk very interesting. I want to be a fantasy writer, promise thought on this video of yours...
Hmm, a simple aspect would also be, including your age, we all have grown up with all the cliches of fantasy. I'd say, given my age, already the late eighties and nineties had lots of terrible cheap dross copying Tolkien, with dark lords everywhere, prophecies and flying dragons.
Also fantasy is full of coming of age stories. You're an adult now and thus the magic of coming of age stories wears of. You want more adult stuff.
If you want real new fantasy you'd need to bring a whole new universe, with barely enough cliché to understand we're in the fantasy universe.
Some LitRPG books I've enjoyed: Dungeon Crawler Carl, Battle Mage Farmer. And Progression Fantasy: Craddle and Beware of Chicken.
Peter Higgins' novel 'Dragon Heart' is full of ubi sunt. It's an under-appreciated gem. Supposed to be the first in a series, but it's been a few years, and no sign of a sequel. I still recommend it as being something truly different and wonderful. The world is being invaded by another, the world is dying, everywhere are relics and memories of ages past. The story is grim and dark beyond even most grimdark, and yet the central characters are people you grow to love and root for, you hold out hope against hope that they will somehow be alright, even as the world darkens and grows more desperate. And then, there is the reason why the novel is titled 'Dragon Heart', which is a mistake, as it has nothing to do with the movie of the name: though a dragon dies, its heart does not, and this is how characters from long ages past are linked to the protagonists of the story.
I think part of the problem is that when anyone tries, they get bombarded by comments from ten thousand superficial nerds saying "Yeah, that was a good story, when Tolkien wrote it."
This video is a massive breath of fresh air. I've been missing the very things you describe--wonder, a sense of antiquity, and "softer" magic systems--and I'm using all of them in my current WIP, first in a new series inspired by Bronze Age Europe and the operas of Wagner.
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
the eagles didn't want to partake in the war, it was only after pearl harbor the eagles decided to help frodo
Great video as always
I also have struggled with modern fantasy alot of dnf and find myself with classic epic fantasy or select authors
Thank you, Benny!
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...
Maybe the problem isn't themes being too obvious. Maybe it's because the presentation being too boring.
Look at Arcane. Its theme is pretty in-your-face, but the presentation is interesting and the story works wonderfully. The main theme is super obvious, and it still has tons of nuanced themes to be discovered.
Nah. It's just harder to find quality stories in this swamped genre. Fantasy has boomed these last two decades because it's far easier to publish novels( Ebooks) these days. Many modern writers still copy the same old tropes early writers used . Also. almost every modern writer starts a series these days. One off books are rare. So sadly we often have a decent story being stretched out over multiple books .
I think the Wheel of Time (books) capture that same feeling
LotR told us how the Shire was founded
My problem with NK Jemisin's The City We Became was that the message was too on the nose for my liking. It's so different to the Fifth Season where everything is so much more mysterious and subtle. I try to stay away from books where the message is obvious or too black and white. I actually think that RF Kuang handled conflicting messages super well in Yellowface. While the main character had very strong opinions and views, there was a level of irony that made it clear that things were more complex than they seemed.
"Classic fantasy is too slow paced and modern ones are faster, thiner etc" I wonder if it has something to do with the booktube/booktok thing. It's a challenge to read 30+ books a month (and not to remember what the story was about) Quantitiy above quality🤔
I also sometimes wonder if our attention spans are ruined which is forcing authors to speed up the pace in their books.
@@libraryofavikingnot only our attention spans are changing, but also the writers'. Maybe they write fast paced stories because they themselves get bored of the slow paced ones. Writers are readers that write, they have changed in the same way we did.
This is why I dislike most modern fantasy novels. They spend so much time focusing on cool flashy fight scenes and intricate magic systems instead of actually telling a good story, building a deep world and developing interesting complex characters.
Great video, nails the issue I have with a lot of modern stuff.
Leave the exhaustive detail for the inevitable TTRPG.
I wasn't aware of LitRPG at all but I've run into the concept in anime and it's almost always terribly lazy.
I also find books that basically proselytize annoying.
Some of my favourite fantasy series like Micheal Scott Rohans Winter of the World and KJ Parker's Fencer and Engineer trilogies just feel so different from a lot of other fantasy...
I am not sure if length has as much bearing on this as how the story is paced and how the story's time is used. The Last Unicorn very much strikes me as a story in the same vein as the older stories you are talking about in this video, and it is incredibly short, but it spends most of its time in the still moments between plot points, not rushing around trying to give us constant action, twists, and drama. I think in many of the older stories, there simply isn't as much "plot" complexity, and even if there is, they simply spent less time going through its motions, and far more engaging with the characters in the moments between.