Fantasy Tropes/Cliches that Annoy You

[Segev]

To be fair to Cosi, it is a peculiar fascination with the notion of the "brave rebel" that has been mainstreamed in our time, and in our time, the Left is the more commonly-seen controller of the pop cultural slant on things.

But no, I didn't say LEFTISTS were fascinated by nor concerned with how "brave" something is. That it was inferred I was speaking of them by that context alone is telling, either about Cosi's awareness of the predominant authorities on approved opinions, or how he perceives Leftist causes as opposed to Rightist ones that he associated my argument as being directly aimed at "the Left."

[Max_Killjoy]

To be fair to Cosi, it is a peculiar fascination with the notion of the "brave rebel" that has been mainstreamed in our time, and in our time, the Left is the more commonly-seen controller of the pop cultural slant on things.

But no, I didn't say LEFTISTS were fascinated by nor concerned with how "brave" something is. That it was inferred I was speaking of them by that context alone is telling, either about Cosi's awareness of the predominant authorities on approved opinions, or how he perceives Leftist causes as opposed to Rightist ones that he associated my argument as being directly aimed at "the Left."

Which may in fact take us back to PhoenixPhyre's earlier statement that inferred "messages" tell us more about the person inferring, than the material the "messages" are inferred from.

[Segev]

Which may in fact take us back to PhoenixPhyre's earlier statement that inferred "messages" tell us more about the person inferring, than the material the "messages" are inferred from.

Indeed. And that is not necessarily a bad thing. Learning more about yourself from what you take away from a story is useful. And sometimes, your inference, though unintended by the author, may be insightful. Helpful to you, or even to others who may not have seen things that way before.

[Max_Killjoy]

Or it's telling because it's a tired stereotype thrown around in certain circles and you're transparent as all else in trying to hedge around it?

As I noted above, it's become at least as common in the "opposite" circles, as well, to claim "brave underdog rebel against insidious forces" status. Personally, I consider this the ironic triumph of postmodernism's disdain for objective fact in favor of, ahem, a "different kind of fact".

The toxic notion that facts are manufactured, rather than discovered, has become equal-opportunity across the political landscape.

FWIW, this conversation is an interesting one and it would be a shame if it became the same old back and froth (pun intended, obviously) that comes about whenever those two circles meet.

Agreed.

[Segev]

I will say I'm surprised to hear it's a "tired stereotype," as I hadn't really heard much discussion of it before I recognized and pointed it out a few times.

The closest I've seen come to it has been the "We're all unique individuals, just like everyone else" line. Which is alternately intended as ironic or to illustrate a lack of self-awareness in the speakers. It's a similar, but not identical, notion.

[Beleriphon]

"Oh! Don't you see? The king's signet ring with a sun symbol on it wouldn't open the magic gate because we need the prince! The prophet meant 'the king's son' not "sun'!" English is probably the only language on Earth where that works. Why would it work on another planet or plane of existence that knows nothing of Earth?

Its because of Tolkien, because the gate's riddle was dependent on understanding that it literally wanted to somebody to say the Elvish word for friend.

[Tinkerer]

Its because of Tolkien, because the gate's riddle was dependent on understanding that it literally wanted to somebody to say the Elvish word for friend.

But that one works in most languages (not every language but a sizable chunk). Whereas the "sun" and "son" one is rather English dependent although you could substitute similar ones in many languages. Like the Chinese poem that is just "shi" repeated for a page (when you write it in a Latin alphabet).

[Cosi]

Segev didn't say anything about "the left" or "leftists" in that post. Is there another post I'm missing where he connects that commentary to "the left"?

"Political correctness" is not something that generally gets used to describe the right.

Likewise, the only "message" the reader should take from that fictional rain is that in that fictional time and place, it is raining. Nothing more. Anything other than that is not in the writing, it's purely and only the reader's own inference.

What if the author did mean something by it? Surely it's at least possible for rain to mean something, right? So how can you tell? Do you just have to ask every author ever what everything in his book means? What if the author changes their mind? What if the author changes their mind after reading fan analysis (apparently this has happened)?

That would result in the statement "every message of the same (information-)size is included in the text". That would be pretty stupid as that would mean every text of the same length shares the same messages. Which means, we don't even need to analyze a text to get the messages, we only need the length a nd get the whole set of messages that are implied.

That assumes that the choices are either "there is one message determined by the author" and "every possible message is valid". That's a false dichotomy. Consider the RPG example I gave. Is the ability broken? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Which it is depends on inherently personal decisions about what "broken" means. But we can confidently say that the answer to the question "is this ability broken" isn't "seven" or "banana" or "<uncontrollable screaming>". And we can also say that the designer saying "this isn't broken" wouldn't change whether the ability was broken.

[icefractal]

For reference, when I said "disagree with the common wisdom" I just meant literally that - disagreeing with the majority of analysis out there. It's not some signaling phrase.

But don't let me interrupt your courageous defense of such bold statements as "All the famous literature is boring crap, only the novels I personally like are worth reading." 😉

[Honest Tiefling]

Fantasy Blasphemy: You know when in fantasy they want to use God's name as an expletive, but they worship a fictional pantheon instead? This is it. A good example is that in The Elder Scrolls people say "By the Nine" or "By Azura" all the time. It might just be that it just sounds off to me due to living in a world where people don't worship those gods.p

I'm agreeing with other posters, I actually like this one because it does seem like something people would do. Then again, I do live in a region where someone might actually say 'By Thor!' and not be referring to a certain comic book character.

Everyone talking about magic: If magic is a mysterious and unknown force, then why is anyone talking about it? If wizards are so well known, why are they not everywhere?

If a mysterious force could turn you inside out and you don't know why, I feel like people would talk about it a bit. They just wouldn't talk about it knowledgeably, and get most, if not all, of their information wrong. Having magic be both mysterious and then wizards setting up shop is a pet peeve. Be consistent with your tone, dammit!

Sexy Vampires: Vampires are corpses. They have been dead and are dead. So then why are vampires, especially female ones supposed to be attractive? This is partially not a rhetorical question, if anyone has the answer to where this started I want to know.

I get mildly uncomfortable when people talk about banging a corpse.

Chosen Ones:
If your protagonist is yet another person who has been chosen by the gods or destiny and everyone loves them, I will sigh and lament to myself. A hero does not need the backing of some great destiny to be awesome and save the day. They can be, y'know, just a good person who works hard to defeat all the evil they can and defy any doom coming their way. A hero who defies destiny is much better in my opinion. Chosen Ones are just fate-based mary sues really.

I admittedly disagree with this one, because I get a real kick out of the idea that destiny isn't your friend. Sure, you might succeed, but that prophecy didn't mention anything about your fingers, loved ones, companions, home town, or sanity, but hey, you did it at least! Hurray!

And that gods far above mortals might decide that one is going to do something for them no matter how the mortal feels about it is a good plot device when in a hurry. Hurray, you're the chosen one! The god might reward you, but let's be serious, serving the god is reward enough, isn't that right, flammable mortal? ...A NEW HAND TOUCHES THE BEACON!

Super Races:
OK, why does a race that amounts to "humans, but better" exist and how? Evolution-wise it doesn't make sense and even for a created setting, did the gods pick favourites or something? Especially when there are no particular draw backs, or the draw backs are hidden away behind hand-wave. Elves are especially problematic here, although I can give a pass to the more "mystical" interpretations, but the ones that are very much animals (in that they are biologically beings) don't really make sense because they should age according to the same rules as humans, but they don't.

Admittedly...There's a certain charm in beating the stuffing out of a haughty race that has better racial bonuses, I have to say. Especially if you get to fight their racial prestige class options...

[Cosi]

I'm agreeing with other posters, I actually like this one because it does seem like something people would do. Then again, I do live in a region where someone might actually say 'By Thor!' and not be referring to a certain comic book character.

I like fantasy swearing. It's a nice way to add some color to the setting without having to do a lot of explanation. From the author's perspective, it also allows them to have vulgarity without having to worry about offending people's sensibilities.

I get mildly uncomfortable when people talk about banging a corpse.

The depiction of vampires is varied enough that I'm not inherently worried about it. Sometimes (as in the Laundry Files) a vampire is just a basically normal person who hasn't even necessarily died, but with superpowers and a craving for blood. Other times (as on The Strain) they're a horrifyingly inhuman monster with a tentacle-stinger for a tongue. Then you have ambiguous cases like Buffy where vampires seem to be largely normal people most of the time (outside of the "game face" and the personality changes), and are presumably maintaining themselves magically somehow in whatever way other demons do.

[Kitten Champion]

I like fantasy swearing. It's a nice way to add some color to the setting without having to do a lot of explanation. From the author's perspective, it also allows them to have vulgarity without having to worry about offending people's sensibilities.

Yeah, it can be an innocuous bit of world-building. Along with blessings, it can express what the character(s) find holy or profane. It's particularly neat for something like Wheel of Time where curses are regional/cultural and you've time to recognize them and logically extrapolate their origin.

Also, there are slurs against others. It can re-contextualize antagonism into existing societal prejudice quite quickly for the reader when there's clearly already racial epithets in active use - mudbloods, for instance.

[Lord Raziere]

I admittedly disagree with this one, because I get a real kick out of the idea that destiny isn't your friend. Sure, you might succeed, but that prophecy didn't mention anything about your fingers, loved ones, companions, home town, or sanity, but hey, you did it at least! Hurray!

And that gods far above mortals might decide that one is going to do something for them no matter how the mortal feels about it is a good plot device when in a hurry. Hurray, you're the chosen one! The god might reward you, but let's be serious, serving the god is reward enough, isn't that right, flammable mortal? ...A NEW HAND TOUCHES THE BEACON!

Thats Screw Destiny not being a chosen one. The cliche I'm talking about is portrayed purely positively. it being portrayed as bad, is original, therefore not the cliche.

[Honest Tiefling]

Thats Screw Destiny not being a chosen one. The cliche I'm talking about is portrayed purely positively. it being portrayed as bad, is original, therefore not the cliche.

Well, Screw Destiny itself is a trope, so one day it might become the cliche and destiny being on the side of the hero might one day reign again. But probably not in RPGs, since it does have issues with player agency. Perhaps if the player has to restore destiny and is scrambling to do so to get bonuses while the BBEG is literally destroying fate...

Also, Screw Destiny often implies that the players successfully avoided their destiny, which implies that destiny isn't the main antagonist that the player characters have to struggle with.

[Segev]

But don't let me interrupt your courageous defense of such bold statements as "All the famous literature is boring crap, only the novels I personally like are worth reading." ��

To be fair, that IS a bold statement that flies in the face of common wisdom, which holds famous literature to generally be worth reading.

Also, I do tend to find much of what is considered classic literature to be boring. But that's a personal taste thing.

Just don't mention the F-word. I will rant.

FAULKNER

[Satinavian]

That assumes that the choices are either "there is one message determined by the author" and "every possible message is valid".

That is true. That is information theory, which would be the proper theoretical framework to discuss these things. I admit, it is a slightly dumbed down explaination.

Consider the RPG example I gave. Is the ability broken? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Which it is depends on inherently personal decisions about what "broken" means. But we can confidently say that the answer to the question "is this ability broken" isn't "seven" or "banana" or "<uncontrollable screaming>". And we can also say that the designer saying "this isn't broken" wouldn't change whether the ability was broken.

That is not a message. That is a value judgement of the work. Of course that depends on the judge and is subjective. Because it was never included in the text (the rulebook), it is something produced with the text and many other sources of information

[Frozen_Feet]

Or, to go back to the "it's raining" example:

Again, in my game, it rains because I rolled that on a random encounter chart. But even at most generous reading, only the fact that it's raining, that it's a result of a random roll, and the table, are actual parts of the message.

We know the table was made by Raggi, but that in no way is communicated by "it's raining", it's not communicated by the die roll, it does not read on the table. To get that information, you need to flip back to author's notes and read who wrote the table.

If there were no author's notes, most "whys" of the rain would be completely obscure. The corollary is that if you need to invoke additional message to infer more about a message, then you've proved that the additional information was not part of the message.

[Bohandas]

the Chinese poem that is just "shi" repeated for a page

There's an english quote like that that's just "buffalo" repeated a bunch of times

Spoiler

Show

But don't let me interrupt your courageous defense of such bold statements as "All the famous literature is boring crap"

To be fair though some of them are. The Great Gatsby was highly unpopular even in it's own time, and it's unclear what, if anything, the book is even supposed to be about (and that's not just my opinion, Fitzgerald himself summed up the contemporary reviews of the book as such: "of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about")

[Bohandas]

"Political correctness" is not something that generally gets used to describe the right.

It doesn;t describe the entire left though either; just the shallow knee-jerk cookie-cutter portion of it (similarly to how not everyone on the right is a redneck or hillbilly)

[Frozen_Feet]

{Scrubbed}

[JBPuffin]

As far as the Lizardfolk go, I think it's just that there are less examples of Lizardfolk in fiction.

Mind Flayers, and to a lesser extent Aboleths, are a different issue. Mind Flayers have to eat people to survive. That's a biological incompatibility with "being a good person" that isn't there with Orcs. It doesn't matter that the Mind Flayer is a sentient being capable of making ethical choices, because for it to survive it has to murder people.

So because they’re forced to do something morally distasteful, they don’t get the second (or third or fourth or infininth) chance everyone else does? What about a vampire? Even though it was once a humanoid of some description, now it’s just a bloodthirsty murderbucket, right? And Lolth’s gone and twisted the drow up their own arses for so long - just look at all the slaves they sacrifice! - surely they’re beyond redemption as well?Moralist racism is still racism, Cosi...

[Koo Rehtorb]

Hand wringing over fantasy racism is as silly as hand wringing over droid slavery in Star Wars. It's just not the point of the respective genres.

[Cosi]

That is not a message. That is a value judgement of the work. Of course that depends on the judge and is subjective. Because it was never included in the text (the rulebook), it is something produced with the text and many other sources of information

That is exactly the message. "Message" doesn't mean "what you wrote", because if you didn't want people to develop subjective opinions about your work, why are you publishing it? A message is an act of communication, and that implies subjectivity in its reception.

If there were no author's notes, most "whys" of the rain would be completely obscure. The corollary is that if you need to invoke additional message to infer more about a message, then you've proved that the additional information was not part of the message.

But why is the scope delineated at "it is raining because of a random roll on a table". What makes that "the message" and "it is raining because of a random roll on a table Raggi wrote" "not the message"? Just you saying so?

So because they’re forced to do something morally distasteful, they don’t get the second (or third or fourth or infininth) chance everyone else does? What about a vampire? Even though it was once a humanoid of some description, now it’s just a bloodthirsty murderbucket, right?

It depends. I agree that doing something bad doesn't make your life forfeit, but the situation with Vampires of Mind Flayers is more complicated than that. On the basic level, while it isn't necessarily okay to kill a Vampire purely because it killed some people (though there are ethicists who would say that it is), it certainly isn't okay to let them Vampire keep killing people, and in many conceptualizations of Vampires, making that decision will kill them. So the question isn't "is the vampire's life forfeit" but "is it really better to let a Vampire starve to death than to kill it". You can debate that, but it's a different debate. Of course, not all Vampires work like that (for example, Buffy vampires can survive off of animal blood), and it's not always completely clear cut (for example, while Laundry Files vampires feed lethally, they can feed on people who are already dying). But I think in the classical conception of Vampires (and to an even higher degree Mind Flayers) your choices are largely "let a serial killer keep killing", "kill him", or "slowly watch him starve to death", and I think a very strong case can be made for "kill him" being the least bad of those choices.

And Lolth’s gone and twisted the drow up their own arses for so long - just look at all the slaves they sacrifice! - surely they’re beyond redemption as well?Moralist racism is still racism, Cosi...

If you characterized Drow that way, you might be able to make that argument, but the game doesn't. The game is pretty clear that while Drow are able to make personal choices, they're all evil because reasons. Notably, those reasons are often that they have a literal religion of evil, which is offensive in much the same way that suggestions about racial stereotypes being true are offensive.

[Bohandas]

{Scrubbed}

[Cosi]

{Scrubbed}

[Scripten]

If the Aztecs had developed a modern secular capitalist society, I think you would have seen a very similar mellowing in their religious practices. Their religious conservatives would probably have a different set of issues (perhaps, less concern about preventing gay marriage and more about preserving the death penalty), but I'm not really competent to make that judgment.

This is the kind of thing I like to see in fantasy and science fiction. Extrapolation from a set of constraints outside the realm of real life experience.

[Lord Raziere]

This is the kind of thing I like to see in fantasy and science fiction. Extrapolation from a set of constraints outside the realm of real life experience.

That specific example sounds more like alternate history to be honest.

[Scripten]

That specific example sounds more like alternate history to be honest.

Oh, absolutely. I just classify alternate history under science fiction, since sci-fi has historically been the meta-genre containing any sort of speculative fiction, be it futuristic or historical in nature. (Heck, it contains a lot of fairly accurate historical fiction in some venues.)

[Cosi]

That specific example sounds more like alternate history to be honest.

First, the lines of the genres are kind of blurred.

A lot of early science fiction now technically counts as "alternate history" to some degree because time has marched past the early parts of their timelines without the listed events happening. A particularly common example is the assumption that the USSR would continue to exist forever, which has manifestly failed to happen (occasionally sequels will massage this by mentioning a reformation of the USSR, or changing to a more generic Russian empire). Authors were often optimistic about technology as well. For example, the CoDominium assumed (IIRC, I can't find the timeline online right now) that we would have interstellar travel by 2004 and interstellar colonies by 2010. This has not happened.

There is a lot of stuff that blurs the line between fantasy and science fiction. A great deal of Zelazny's work (particularly Lord of Light and Creatures of Light and Darkness) borrows freely from both genres. Pretty much everything Mike Lawrence has written has elements of both (the Broken Empire is set in the far future with both lost technology and magic, the Book of the Ancestor is set on a colony world that's collapsed into a medieval setting and also has magic). The Laundry Files is Charles Stross's is "computer science meets Lovecraftian magic". Empire of the East, There Will be Dragons, The Second Apocalypse, The Dying Earth, The Book of the New Sun, Jacob's Ladder, and Shadow Ops all blend aspects of both. So does Shadowrun, and some of the early D&D adventures and settings.

Fantasy also occasionally makes claims that would make it technically alternate history. Many things (Earthdawn springs to mind) claim to theoretically be accounts of early Earth history (or prehistory) that contain magic that was manifestly not present in those periods.

IIRC, all three are considered subgenres of the broader classification of "speculative fiction" and ideas percolate pretty freely between them.

Second, there is at least one example of the idea in question (what if the Aztecs survived to today) in a science fiction setting. There was a book I saw as a kid where the premise was that China never stopped sending out their treasure ships, ended up advancing rapidly as a result of combining technologies from distant parts of the world, and ended up conquering everything except a resurgent Aztec empire. I think it is probably a universal law that any historical what-if you can think of has shown up in at least one obscure science fiction work.

[Segev]

{Scrubbed}