Fantasy Tropes/Cliches that Annoy You

[Blackhawk748]

*looks at bolded part*

*looks at avatar*

*narrows eyes*

Yeah, alright. I actually watched the Golden Egg arc of Berserk on Netflix and they did have some pretty good helmets that were somewhat open-faced.

I think Dark Souls games tend to have many characters with fully covered faces, so that might be pretty close to an example of everyone wearing full helms. Certainly draws more attention to the expressiveness of voice acting.

Dark Souls is a good one. Oblivion wasnt to bad about it either, as most helms where open faced. But ya, Vox brings up a good point about Heraldry. Its entire bloody point is differentiating people, so Sir Greg (our hero) can stride into combat wearing his bassinet helmet and green tabard with the griffon and his enemy Lord Keith can wear his bassinet and his red tabard with a bear and the audience can know who is who. Also it allows for great fake outs without making it obvious.

[Potato_Priest]

I'm going to have to pitch in in favor of helmetless heroes in film. I have a significant amount of trouble trouble telling who is who in a film even with the helmets off. Usually it comes down to the heroes' hairstyles, so even a small metal cap can significantly hurt my ability to tell them apart unless they have distinctive facial hair.

[Xuc Xac]

I think the Iron Man movies did helmets right. You don't take the helmet off in dangerous situations because that's stupid. However, that's no reason the audience can't see what's going on inside the helmet. The holographic HUD might require modern CGI, but there's no reason this technique couldn't have been used in the earliest motion pictures or comic books.

[Max_Killjoy]

If you want to have a real discussion, you might want to re-read your posts for manners before hitting the submit.

Your advice on that matter has been given all due consideration.

You can just write about people and a place and time and an account of things that happened. These things are called accounts or transcriptions or nonfictions, and so on. They often fall outside the domain of "literature," but even they make an attempt to trim out information that is not pertinent to their intention.

So you'd consider, say, Ringworld to be in the category of "accounts or transcriptions or nonfictions"?

People tell stories with intention to begin with: I might tell you a story of how awful my ex-girlfriend is as a cautionary tale, as a tale meant to aggrandize myself, as a tale meant to sling mud on her. I might write a story with a cynical mindset of trying to make a few bucks on chumps who buy my worthless book, but then I'd be filling this story with stuff I think chumps like to read. I might write a story because I think the story is good at encapsulating the reality of a certain situation, a certain place, a certain time, and so on, and I want to bare this reality to other people (fantasy and sci-fi does this often). I might tell a story in a weird artsy gambit to show people what a story without an intention looks like... but then that would be the intention.

The reason why rain is not just rain in a fictional story is because if the author decided to include a mention of the rain at all it must have some intention behind it, even if it was in an extremely small and/or unremarkable way. Go find 3 short stories that take place in a house, or where the characters enter a house. You could probably find some on the internet if you look for some short stories at all. Now collect the following information about the house from these short stories:

- Are the floors of the house hardwood, tile, or rug?
- How many windows does this house have?

Chances are, you cannot find this information in the first 3 short stories you found on the internet that take place in a house, or where the characters enter a house. You couldn't find this information because the author did not believe this information aligned to his/her intention of telling the story.

Rain is probably used as an example in your book because rain is so deeply entrenched in many common tropes, but neither does this mean every use of rain is a heavy-handed attempt to hit you over the head. I have read about rain as simple plot devices - there is rain so someone can later slip on a puddle. I have read about rain simply as a piece of a whole portrayal of nature as beautiful. I have read about rain just so that a character can make a hard-boiled comment about it. This is why I say parsimony is advised when applying criticisms on literature.

I find most short fiction rather sparse on setting detail, it's not my favorite form, but I realize why it needs to be that way.

But I get the sense we're talking about two different things here.

I'm not talking about why an author might include or leave out details, or, well, anything -- or their reasons for doing so. That's a separate question from what I thought we were talking about, which is whether every piece of fiction has a capital-M Message, something about the world that it's actively trying to say.

I'm not fond of works with a "message." That is, if you're trying to push symbolism, teach a lesson, or make some moral point, let me know up front so I can put the book down or stop the movie. I watch, read, and consume entertainment for the entertainment. And to let me wonder "what if." To paint pictures, to tell stories. "Message" fiction always does that badly in that it fails to be entertaining. This is true even when I fully agree with the point being made. Even great allegorical works such as The Pilgrim's Progress or C.S. Lewis's Narnia series leave me a bit cold. The modern tendency to make everything political, everything must have a message, must have a greater meaning--that's obnoxious to me. Just tell the story. Let me engage with the characters. Let me, for a moment, get lost in the world you've created. Real life has enough worry and bother and grey areas, enough X-ism and political controversy. Don't shove it down my throat in those few moments I can enter another world. Please. I beg of you.

Wait.

What have you read which has no message in it whatsoever?

Are you counting messages explicit as well as implied?

Yeah, if I'm reading, gaming, or writing, in a speculative fiction setting, it's for exploration, not to be "taught" a "lesson". That might include exploring an idea, but I'm there to explore it, not be allogorized at about it.

~~~~

There's plenty of fiction that has no message.

The idea that every piece of fiction has "a message" has been hammered at us quite intensely by academic literary criticism wanks for a long time, including that idea that if you see a message then there is a message.

But it's quite possible to write a work with no message, and a good work at that. A detective novel can be just about the crime(s) being solved or the mystery being unraveled, and nothing more -- no allegory, no symbolism, no underlying meaning or message, just a damn good story about compelling characters in an interesting setting.

I have to wonder if "message" as PhoenixPhyre meant it, is a more specific and narrow meaning for the word, than the meaning of "message" you're thinking of.

[Vitruviansquid]

Your advice on that matter has been given all due consideration.




So you'd consider, say, Ringworld to be in the category of "accounts or transcriptions or nonfictions"?




I find most short fiction rather sparse on setting detail, it's not my favorite form, but I realize why it needs to be that way.

But I get the sense we're talking about two different things here.

I'm not talking about why an author might include or leave out details, or, well, anything -- or their reasons for doing so. That's a separate question from what I thought we were talking about, which is whether every piece of fiction has a capital-M Message, something about the world that it's actively trying to say.






I have to wonder if "message" as PhoenixPhyre meant it, is a more specific and narrow meaning for the word, than the meaning of "message" you're thinking of.

Ah, of course the definition of "message" is going to shift and swirl, and somehow everyone else is never talking about it in the right way and you are.

I think we're done here.

[Max_Killjoy]

Ah, of course the definition of "message" is going to shift and swirl, and somehow everyone else is never talking about it in the right way and you are.

Your words, not mine -- I did not say that you were wrong.

And I did not attempt to change or shift the definition -- I wondered aloud whether PhoenixPhyre and you might not be using the word differently. Not right, not wrong... different.

What I can't figure out is how we got from talking about message, to talking about intention -- "I might write a story because I think the story is good at encapsulating the reality of a certain situation, a certain place, a certain time, and so on, and I want to bare this reality to other people (fantasy and sci-fi does this often)."

What does rain in a story because it's raining, have to do with rain in a story because the author wanted a symbol for something?

[Xuc Xac]

What does rain in a story because it's raining, have to do with rain in a story because the author wanted a symbol for something?

Unless it's non-fiction, it isn't "raining because it's raining". In fiction, it's raining because the author decided it's raining.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yeah but its always the same reasons:
"we the gods have decided not to interfere with the affairs of mortals for.........no discernible reason!"
"we the elves have decided not to interfere with the affairs of mortals for no reason, because wisdom."
"we the dragons have decided not to interfere because um........rar I'm a dragon!."
"we the vampires haven't formed a vampire nobility to rule over humanity now because.......we like secrecy?"
"we wizards have decided not to interfere because we're busy locked up studying maaaaaaaaaaaagic. also because wisdom"
"we the angels only interfere in very small ways that in retrospect, aren't really enough when you think about it. because wisdom."
"I the villain am going to take over and actually make this happen.......for myself. what? allies? nah. just me. because evil."

In order:

The gods are not omnipotent omniscient beings with infinite ability to infinitely meddle. The gods have bigger fish to fry than directly ruling the daily workings of mortal governance. The gods spend more time fighting each other than ruling the universe.

The elves are an old people whose great age was in the past. The elves tried it before, failed, and have a cultural aversion.

The dragons are solitary, asocial creatures with no inclination to form hierarchies or states.

The vampires realize they're outnumbered many 1000s to 1, and they've gotten burned (literally) by meddling in the past. The vampires are ruling things... from the shadows.

Wizards are harder, but depends on how much power, what kinds of powers, how many there are, etc, and whether they actively seek to thwart each other.

Angels... meh, they're angels, not their job, and they're probably taking orders from the being(s) in the first item.

[Max_Killjoy]

Unless it's non-fiction, it isn't "raining because it's raining". In fiction, it's raining because the author decided it's raining.

Yes. Everything in a work of fiction is there because the author put it there. This is true and universal enough that I'd consider it a meaningless distinction.

IMO, there's a fundamental difference between the author putting rain in the scene because it's raining, and the author putting rain in the scene to symbolize cleansing, or turmoil, or whatever.

When I'm writing, rain usually goes into a scene just because as I picture the scene, it's raining -- that's it. No meaning, no message, no symbol, nothing to tell the reader. It's just raining. And for whatever reason, it irks the hell out of me that someone might someday be reading that and trying to figure out "why" it's raining... and "finding" something that's just not there.


(Rain just serving as an example here.)

[icefractal]

IMO, there's a fundamental difference between the author putting rain in the scene because it's raining, and the author putting rain in the scene to symbolize cleansing, or turmoil, or whatever.

Bolding mine. What is raining? It's a fictional scene being written by the author. There is no objective "it" for the rain to be coming from.

When I'm writing, rain usually goes into a scene just because as I picture the scene, it's raining -- that's it.

But you're picturing it to be raining for some reason. Maybe because it feels aesthetically more fitting, maybe because you think that the rain is implied by another scene earlier or later, maybe because it was raining IRL when you were thinking about it. And maybe because you think of the rain as symbolically fitting with the scene in some way. After all, if you're not sure what the reason was, how can you say for sure it wasn't that?

If anything, decisions that are made on the basis of "just visualizing the scene" or "what feels natural" are more likely to be influenced by the biases and preconceptions of the author, not less. That's not always a bad thing - if you feel like rain suits a scene, that feeling probably resonates with some portion of people, and is an interesting contrast for people who would imagine it sunny instead. But in the case where a piece of fiction strongly appears to be saying something unpleasant, "the author just felt like that was the natural way for things to be" doesn't really make it better.

[Frozen_Feet]

Unless it's non-fiction, it isn't "raining because it's raining". In fiction, it's raining because the author decided it's raining.

Yes. And?

Like, this is the same sort of pseudo-profoundity as "everything in a roleplaying game happens because some player made it happen".

Well duh. Everybody knows that. The thing is, it's a half-formed thought if you don't have in mind a specific reason why the author put it there or the player made it happen. Even then, it might be useless depending on what the actual reason is.

For example, why did it rain in my last tabletop game? Well I happened to roll for rain on the random encounter table. So why was rain on the table? Because James Raggi put it there in 2010. So why did Raggi put it there? Hell if I know, probably because rain is a thing that occasionally happens in our world, so he put it in the game world as well.

Three layers of why, none of them give much additional meaning to the original message, which is "it is now raining in the game".

In case of a book, the author may have blanked out for a moment, looked out a window to see it was raining, and based on that, made it rain in their fiction. So the reason why it rained in the fiction is because occasionally, it rains. Again, not much is added to the meaning of the message "it is raining".

[Xuc Xac]

For example, why did it rain in my last tabletop game? Well I happened to roll for rain on the random encounter table. So why was rain on the table? Because James Raggi put it there in 2010. So why did Raggi put it there? Hell if I know, probably because rain is a thing that occasionally happens in our world, so he put it in the game world as well.

Three layers of why, none of them give much additional meaning to the original message, which is "it is now raining in the game".

In case of a book, the author may have blanked out for a moment, looked out a window to see it was raining, and based on that, made it rain in their fiction. So the reason why it rained in the fiction is because occasionally, it rains. Again, not much is added to the meaning of the message "it is raining".

In the case of James Raggi putting rain on a random encounter chart, he did it to fill up the chart with different possibilities of weather phenomena. The reason he made a weather chart in the first place is because that's the OSR way to do things and he wants to do things the OSR way (i.e. randomly generate as much as possible with charts and stuff so the GM can be an impartial "referee" instead of an "author" or "director").

In the case of a book, it's there for a reason. It adds to the mood of the scene. It gives a character a chance to say or do something about the rain that presents or develops their character. It symbolizes something. It's thrown in at random by the author just to show that random things can happen for no reason (most obvious when a seemingly important character suddenly dies to show that "life is cheap" or "bad things can happen at any time to anybody", but sudden rain is a less severe example). Or, as you say, it's thrown in at random just to fill page space. If it isn't just fanfic and there's a real editor involved, that useless space filler will get cut out. If it doesn't serve any purpose, it's just bad writing and an editor will tell you to tighten that up. If you're being paid by the word for a magazine or RPG supplement and it doesn't serve any purpose other than to pad the word count, the editor will definitely cut it (and be unhappy that he had to waste time cutting something obviously useless when you were probably given a specific word limit when you were assigned to write something). Unless you're a monkey banging away on a typewriter at random, there is no such thing as "I just made it up. There's no reason for it." It's not always a deep reason, but there's a reason.

[Frozen_Feet]

Yes. And?

You should've realized by the last sentence that you're not arguing against anything I said. Sure, there's "always a reason" in the sense that something happened to cause the effect you see, but that's not the same as that effect having a Big Damn Thing to say about the outside world.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yes. And?

You should've realized by the last sentence that you're not arguing against anything I said. Sure, there's "always a reason" in the sense that something happened to cause the effect you see, but that's not the same as that effect having a Big Damn Thing to say about the outside world.

Indeed, somehow the discussion went from PhoenixPhyre's original statement that (to me at least) seemed pretty clearly directed against the insistence that every story has "Big Damn Points" and me making the general assertion that not every story has to have "Big Damn Points" to say about real-world stuff... to people arguing in response that everything in a story happens "for a reason"... and it appears that the latter supposed to be a refutation of the former?

And I can't figure out how that's supposed to be. It's like saying "not all apples are red" and being told in response "shows what you know, all grapefruit are round!" Yeah, we're still talking about fruit, but that obscures that we're talking past each other.


So, if "message" is being used by some people in a broad sense to mean something even as wide-open as "any non-random information being conveyed from the author to the audience via the fictional medium", or some such... I'd ask those people what word(s) should we use for what PhoenixPhyre was actually objecting to? Because I don't think it's fair, and I don't think it fosters any actual conversation, for people to object to PhoenixPhyre's complaint about capital-M "Message" by insisting that all fiction contains small-m "message".

[PhoenixPhyre]

Indeed, somehow the discussion went from PhoenixPhyre's original statement that (to me at least) seemed pretty clearly directed against the insistence that every story has "Big Damn Points" and me making the general assertion that not every story has to have "Big Damn Points" to say about real-world stuff... to people arguing in response that everything in a story happens "for a reason"... and it appears that the latter supposed to be a refutation of the former?

And I can't figure out how that's supposed to be. It's like saying "not all apples are red" and being told in response "shows what you know, all grapefruit are round!"

Yes. And?

You should've realized by the last sentence that you're not arguing against anything I said. Sure, there's "always a reason" in the sense that something happened to cause the effect you see, but that's not the same as that effect having a Big Damn Thing to say about the outside world.

This is exactly it. My opposition was to the idea that the moral worth of a work is based in what it tells us about the real world or the lessons it teaches. Entertainment, wonder, and yes, even escape--these have moral value. This attitude that there must be a "Big Darn Point", to me, is one of the reasons why kids learn to hate reading in school. They don't get to read anything fun without having to tear it apart looking for nuggets of questionable "meaning" or for "symbols," if they read anything fun at all. They have the sense of wonder, the sense of exploring a new world just for the sake of exploration, beaten out of them with analysis and book reports. It's why I find most modern fantasy stultifying. It's obvious that the writer is trying to insert some allegory or metaphor about the real world--usually something political. That is, they have a "Big Darn Point" to make and the story is just a Trojan Horse to hide inside of.

I learned to read because that's what there was to do. I read everything growing up, including the encyclopedias. Multiple times. I've always had words, worlds, stories burning in my blood trying to escape. For many years I told myself these stories, explored these worlds as I sat bored in class or as I walked home alone. Granted, they weren't very good stories, but they kept me sane. Let me escape the soul-numbing loneliness of my childhood and the psychological abuse that came from my older brother. Anyone who tells me that that has no moral value, that only "serious" fiction counts is wrong, flat out. And that's what I was reacting to. Because I heard that growing up. "Why do you read those trashy fantasy books. Why don't you read [insert "classic" here that I had already read and found boring]?" That was a sign that the person wasn't really trying to understand me.

Now I DM because I've realized that I suck at building characters or plots that anyone wants to care about, but I'm alright at coming up with worlds. I can do NPCs because they're not in the spotlight very long. They're supporting cast, not main characters. The players contribute the main characters, the catalysts for change, and between us the story is discovered. I get to react to what they do and explore that path wherever it takes us. Having players also keeps me focused on one world until it's fully explored--otherwise I'd get distracted by another project since I'm a bit of a dilettante.

Now, as to tropes and cliches--this one isn't just for fantasy, but I'm not fond of Chekov's Gun as a universal principle. It works for the type of fiction Chekov was creating. Short plays, even short stories. In larger pieces, in works more atmospheric, there is a place for "unnecessary" plot elements. What would a mystery be without a few red herrings? More broadly, I'm not fond of the idea that there are many "universal principles" for fiction writing that apply to all types of fiction. Different genres, different media, different formats need different conventions and techniques. Some writers excel at one but fail at others. Some techniques work well in print but fail in film (the inner monologue, for example, is hard to pull off in film).

[Hypersmith]

Now, as to tropes and cliches--this one isn't just for fantasy, but I'm not fond of Chekov's Gun as a universal principle. It works for the type of fiction Chekov was creating. Short plays, even short stories. In larger pieces, in works more atmospheric, there is a place for "unnecessary" plot elements. What would a mystery be without a few red herrings? More broadly, I'm not fond of the idea that there are many "universal principles" for fiction writing that apply to all types of fiction. Different genres, different media, different formats need different conventions and techniques. Some writers excel at one but fail at others. Some techniques work well in print but fail in film (the inner monologue, for example, is hard to pull off in film).

Although to be honest it's something I like pulling on my players. I can't say I dislike the trope because it lets me set up red herrings based on their expectations.

[Guizonde]

Although to be honest it's something I like pulling on my players. I can't say I dislike the trope because it lets me set up red herrings based on their expectations.

as a player, chekov's gun is my leitmotif for trolling the dm. a small hand mirror, a notebook, a piece of chalk, a compass (ok, a magnetized needle and a bowl of water to be exact)... all of those things have allowed me and my team to bypass entire sections of the plot just because the dm forgot i'm a resourceful magpie. hell, i actually refuse to create a character that doesn't have a reflective surface and a means to light a fire. for my friend, it's a crowbar and rope.

biggest chekov's gun was sprung on me as a dm. it was the following: a box of crayons and a whistle. the players coordinated a plan without speaking in-character just using those two items. i kicked myself for houseruling "every player character starts the game with a useful-useless object costing the equivalent of 1gp or less" and promptly forgetting that two players had picked those things.

i don't necessarily like it when it's integral to the plot, but that would be closer to the "mcguffin" usually. in my experience, it's some forgotten thingy that becomes the only solution to a problem by sheer serendipity.

[Potato_Priest]

I try to avoid traveling without my trusty rope and shovel.

So far, I've never used the shovel for digging, but it's made a good canoe paddle and several other things.

[Bohandas]

If you want to have a real discussion, you might want to re-read your posts for manners before hitting the submit.

You can just write about people and a place and time and an account of things that happened. These things are called accounts or transcriptions or nonfictions, and so on. They often fall outside the domain of "literature," but even they make an attempt to trim out information that is not pertinent to their intention.

People tell stories with intention to begin with: I might tell you a story of how awful my ex-girlfriend is as a cautionary tale, as a tale meant to aggrandize myself, as a tale meant to sling mud on her. I might write a story with a cynical mindset of trying to make a few bucks on chumps who buy my worthless book, but then I'd be filling this story with stuff I think chumps like to read. I might write a story because I think the story is good at encapsulating the reality of a certain situation, a certain place, a certain time, and so on, and I want to bare this reality to other people (fantasy and sci-fi does this often). I might tell a story in a weird artsy gambit to show people what a story without an intention looks like... but then that would be the intention.

The reason why rain is not just rain in a fictional story is because if the author decided to include a mention of the rain at all it must have some intention behind it, even if it was in an extremely small and/or unremarkable way. Go find 3 short stories that take place in a house, or where the characters enter a house. You could probably find some on the internet if you look for some short stories at all. Now collect the following information about the house from these short stories:

- Are the floors of the house hardwood, tile, or rug?
- How many windows does this house have?

Chances are, you cannot find this information in the first 3 short stories you found on the internet that take place in a house, or where the characters enter a house. You couldn't find this information because the author did not believe this information aligned to his/her intention of telling the story.

What about when it's raining in a Dickens novel? He included a lot of unnecessary detail because he was paid by the word.

[Bohandas]

"we the vampires haven't formed a vampire nobility to rule over humanity now because.......we like secrecy?"

Which brings up another trope that taxes suspension of disbelief, the unnecessarily secret society, of the sort we see in things like Men In Black, Harry Potter, and so on and so on

[Guizonde]

I try to avoid traveling without my trusty rope and shovel.

So far, I've never used the shovel for digging, but it's made a good canoe paddle and several other things.

... why didn't i think of that?!

oh yeah, because even when camping, i always forget to bring a shovel. i've gotten good at improvising digging a fire-pit without using shovels.

there's actually a growing in-joke in my pf team. my dm and i deplored the lack of "handle rope" as a skill in pf. so whenever we need a rope, use one, or do shenanigans involving stringing up summat like a christmas ham, at least one of us sigh out, "why did they take out handle rope?" if you can't solve it with a rope in dnd, you're not trying hard enough. it's like a muggle prestidigitation!

[BRC]

Which brings up another trope that taxes suspension of disbelief, the unnecessarily secret society, of the sort we see in things like Men In Black, Harry Potter, and so on and so on

Eh, the "Hidden World" Genre carries a certain appeal with it. There is a certain amount of escapism to be found in the concept of a "hidden world" underneath our own that the protagonist/Reader could discover or be brought into.

it also allows a writer to use the real world as the basis of the setting. You don't have to explain the city the action is taking place in, you can just say "London" or "Chicago" or what have you.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Eh, the "Hidden World" Genre carries a certain appeal with it. There is a certain amount of escapism to be found in the concept of a "hidden world" underneath our own that the protagonist/Reader could discover or be brought into.

it also allows a writer to use the real world as the basis of the setting. You don't have to explain the city the action is taking place in, you can just say "London" or "Chicago" or what have you.

I only find the masquerade trope to be a problem if it would be blatantly obvious but everyone is oblivious out of narrative necessity (as in most anime involving flashy techniques in plain daylight). I can see it working if the government knows but suppresses that knowledge (a la Men in Black) or if it's quiet and/or policed by magic.

[Bohandas]

I think it goes a bit further than that. We have Planets of Hats in sci-fi for the same reason. Coming up with an alien race (or a demihumanoid one) and one culture for it is enough to tell most stories that will involve meeting that race. Coming up with a half-dozen cultures (still a gross underrepresentation of what probably exists!) is a lot of work for something that you'll expose only one or two members of to the audience. And then, when later works expand on it, you've just got the one established culture treated as monolithic, so it becomes such.

I don't think planets of hats are necessarily unrealistic. The seperareness of cultures is a doomed relic of pre-information-age society. In time, and barring some great horrific catastrophe, they will eventually all merge into one culture.

[Bohandas]

I only find the masquerade trope to be a problem if it would be blatantly obvious but everyone is oblivious out of narrative necessity (as in most anime involving flashy techniques in plain daylight). I can see it working if the government knows but suppresses that knowledge (a la Men in Black) or if it's quiet and/or policed by magic.

The issue isn't that the secrecy would be difficult to maintain, the issue is that the necessity of the secrecy is generally questionable at best.

[Potato_Priest]

I don't think planets of hats are necessarily unrealistic. The seperareness of cultures is a doomed relic of pre-information-age society. In time, and barring some great catastrophe, they will eventually all merge into one culture.

More significant perhaps is the fact that alien lifeforms would likely be incredibly different from us, so much so that they might seem uniform to us. All the distinctions between earth human cultures are probably pretty small and difficult for aliens to distinguish, I'd wager.

[Malimar]

Which brings up another trope that taxes suspension of disbelief, the unnecessarily secret society, of the sort we see in things like Men In Black, Harry Potter, and so on and so on

This brings to mind an ancient trope I tire of:

Normal person from this world travels to special magic world. Narnia, Wizard of Oz, Phantom Tollbooth, Harry Potter, even Doctor Who. This mostly annoys me because it's so ubiquitous I'm tired of it, not because of any inherent problems with the concept (although it is a little insulting to my abilities of imagination to have it presumed that I require a viewpoint person who is like me). At this point I'd much rather read about natives in the strange land than people from my land visiting it.

[Bohandas]

More significant perhaps is the fact that alien lifeforms would likely be incredibly different from us, so much so that they might seem uniform to us. All the distinctions between earth human cultures are probably pretty small and difficult for aliens to distinguish, I'd wager.

That's a good point too.

[Xuc Xac]

The issue isn't that the secrecy would be difficult to maintain, the issue is that the necessity of the secrecy is generally questionable at best.

It makes sense in Men in Black and Harry Potter though. In MiB, they specifically explain that they think the population would panic if they knew. They might be wrong about that, but they don't want to risk it. Also, it's a lot easier to keep street gangs and international arms dealers from getting their hands on a crate full of noisy crickets if they don't know they're available.

In Harry Potter, wizards like to think they're inherently superior but they know they can be easily taken out by a slave revolt muggle uprising. One muggle with a revolver can go "BLAM BLAM BLAM!" and put two in the chest and one in the head while a wizard waves his wand and says "Exp... gah!" The world-building in Harry Potter is incredibly sloppy and full of holes, but the wizards hiding from the muggles is one of the few things that makes sense.

And the secret vampire conspiracy? In the real world, the vast majority of the world is owned by a handful of corporations through subsidiaries, dummy corporations, and layers of shell companies. The vampires can easily run everything by putting themselves into that already-hidden hierarchy as one more layer in the onion.

In many cases, ruling from the shadows is just plain easier than doing it openly. A vampire might be powerful enough to fight off any human vampire hunter, but there's always a chance that one of them will get a lucky shot (especially if they have a worldwide organization that spends centuries studying your habits and weaknesses and training to exploit them). Even if they never hurt you, you still have to waste time dealing with the assassins and hunting down the cells of vampire hunters to keep them from getting out of control. It's just a lot less hassle to hide. Nobody tries to put a stake through the heart of the Lucard Cayman Islands Offshore Holding Corporation which just so happens to own several dozens subsidiaries that collectively own 51% stock in almost everything.

[Vitruviansquid]

This is exactly it. My opposition was to the idea that the moral worth of a work is based in what it tells us about the real world or the lessons it teaches.

What you are saying has radically changed from what you were saying at the start, but this is the process of understanding, I suppose.

Entertainment, wonder, and yes, even escape--these have moral value. This attitude that there must be a "Big Darn Point", to me, is one of the reasons why kids learn to hate reading in school. They don't get to read anything fun without having to tear it apart looking for nuggets of questionable "meaning" or for "symbols," if they read anything fun at all. They have the sense of wonder, the sense of exploring a new world just for the sake of exploration, beaten out of them with analysis and book reports. It's why I find most modern fantasy stultifying. It's obvious that the writer is trying to insert some allegory or metaphor about the real world--usually something political. That is, they have a "Big Darn Point" to make and the story is just a Trojan Horse to hide inside of.

Based on the part I bolded, it sounds more like you have a problem with teachers and getting assignments from them.

It is perfectly reasonable to read a book and leave it thinking "I didn't understand that at all, there seemed to be no message in there." Not all books are written for all people. You can imagine that heterosexual men might not really get the point of the Twilight series after reading it, that people who have had no education whatsoever in western history wouldn't understand most of Lord of the Rings, and so on. There is something to be said for endeavoring to put yourself into the mindset of a different person in order to try to understand the book's perspective and something to be said about how a good text will try to explain its perspective to absorb more readers, but if I'm writing a novel specifically about the experiences of an extremely small minority (let's say, vampire-obsessed ethnically Hmong intersex teenagers) then it is very possible most people won't get it.

It is reasonable and mature to understand that not all texts are meant for you. But the way you are characterizing literary criticism, as your teacher threatening to fail you if you don't get the "Big Darn Point," is not fair. You are throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Just because a book does not seem to have a unified, single message, that does not mean the book is totally bereft of messages nor does it mean it is worthless to try to understand what messages there are. Many authors write books to make or communicate meaning of the world as they see them (J.R.R. Tolkien, once again), which will entail multiple messages getting sent, after all, J.R.R. Tolkien will have a unique view about warfare, about what is right and wrong, about how men should deal with struggles, about early Medieval epics, and so on. So your analogy to the Trojan horse is half accurate - a story is a wrapping for ideas - but think of it more like the Trojan Horse with many big and small angry Achaeans sitting inside - each soldier is an idea that works together with the others to make a complete package that must be delivered together. They wouldn't have build the Trojan Horse if they didn't need it to enter Troy.

I learned to read because that's what there was to do. I read everything growing up, including the encyclopedias. Multiple times. I've always had words, worlds, stories burning in my blood trying to escape. For many years I told myself these stories, explored these worlds as I sat bored in class or as I walked home alone. Granted, they weren't very good stories, but they kept me sane. Let me escape the soul-numbing loneliness of my childhood and the psychological abuse that came from my older brother. Anyone who tells me that that has no moral value, that only "serious" fiction counts is wrong, flat out. And that's what I was reacting to. Because I heard that growing up. "Why do you read those trashy fantasy books. Why don't you read [insert "classic" here that I had already read and found boring]?" That was a sign that the person wasn't really trying to understand me.

Have you ever thought about why were these fantasy worlds in books so compelling that you could escape to them? It is because these fantasy books have messages that resonated with you whether you were aware of them or not. You might realize that when you read fantasy books to explore other worlds, some worlds turn out to be more interesting to explore than others. You'll have noticed this because some of those worlds carry messages with resonated more with you than did the others. Literary criticism is the project of trying to understand why some of these worlds are more interesting and why some are not. To do that, we have to tease out the messages present in these works, the premises they operate under, the structures they take, and so on.

Literary criticism is often marred by ignorant, arrogant people who fail to realize that some texts they cannot appreciate were simply not written for them. These people telling you that entire classes of books are wrong and bad have never applied literary criticism to them. Had they applied literary criticism, they would realize that Twilight says something about how the blandest and most unremarkable are special to someone out there. Harry Potter says plenty on the subject of escapism, how this thing that most children crave and that conservative culture has long deemed unworthy of your time ("stop reading about elves and start thinking about your future, young man!") actually has the capacity to ennoble you and make you mature. That's not even saying how almost all these books I've encountered feature characters who are strong of mind and spirit and use these virtues to handle every adversity that comes their way.

So when people tell you that your Drizzt books or your Ciaphas Cain books or your vampire novels have no value because they don't spread a message, you should recognize that it is they who can't see the messages within these books. Had someone sat your English teacher down to read Wheel of Time and asked him/her to write a report about the messages therein, he/she might learn to appreciate them!

Now I DM because I've realized that I suck at building characters or plots that anyone wants to care about, but I'm alright at coming up with worlds. I can do NPCs because they're not in the spotlight very long. They're supporting cast, not main characters. The players contribute the main characters, the catalysts for change, and between us the story is discovered. I get to react to what they do and explore that path wherever it takes us. Having players also keeps me focused on one world until it's fully explored--otherwise I'd get distracted by another project since I'm a bit of a dilettante.

What does it mean to be "alright at coming up with worlds?" If you are alright at it, there must be people who are bad at coming up with worlds and people who are good at coming up with worlds, right? What are the qualities that make a world good or bad? And then where do those qualities come from? How do we replicate those qualities over and over to become better at building worlds?