Ask Lemmy

You're looking for opinions? I got opinions.

• The Chosen One who gets dragged around like a sack of potatoes until they Come Into Their Own and go on to Turn The Tide.

• The Wise Yet Enigmatic Sage.

• The Sharp-Tongued Princess.

• The Rogue With A Heart of Gold.

• Plots based on misunderstanding ancient prophecies that are so vaguely written they could be cookie recipes.

• Gods that slot into neat roles on a godly table of elements.

• Magic systems so detailed and prosaic you may as well call them technology.

• Elves that are exactly like every other elf character you've ever read about except for one glaring but superficial difference which is there to make you think the author's not plagiarising their own favourite author.

Just finished watching The 100 on Netflix. The writing was pretty terrible.

• Literally every bad action performed by a character (up to and including genocide) was justified as "I had no choice". They should have called it, "The no choice show". I would have loved to have seen a counter in the corner of the screen that ticked up every time that was said, which was at least once per episode.

• Seconds before any kind of solution that would have solved major problems was enacted, a character (different each time)- previously rational, but now for some reason completely chaotic- would jump in and destroy the McGuffin and fuck everyone over because it was in their personal interest. Every single fucking time, even in the final episode. It's no longer a plot twist, it's just lazy AF writing. It also meant that the characters had no consistency or predictability of motive, which meant their believability went down the toilet.

I'm going to stop there but believe me, that's the tip of the iceberg.

That show was proof that Netflix will greenlight just about anything.

"I am not [well known character archetype]"

does literally everything possible to follow that archetype

^cough^ ^cough^ ^one^ ^piece^ ^cough^ ^cough^

So far I’ve discovered in this thread:

-People don’t like traditional fantasy that takes itself seriously.
-People don’t like lighthearted fantasy that plays with the themes.
-People don’t like hard magical systems.
-People don’t like soft magical systems.
-People don’t like dragons being involved.
-People don’t like an absence of dragons.
-People don’t like character archetypes.
-People don’t like counterarchetypes.
-People don’t like when characters speak an understandable language.
-People don’t like characters meeting each other in common social meeting areas.

All good here? Great.

Just write whatever the fuck you want. There’s always an audience.

The main character is given so much buff.

I still looking fiction where main character is ordinary person.

• No godly fast learning/growthing speed.
• No extraordinary willpower that train day and night with bare minimum on food and housing
• No hack-like device/weapon/...

Elves and Dwarves done like every other Elf and Dwarf. Especially when they go out of their way to give the Dwarf that overdone Irish/Scottish accent written out in damn near unreadable text.

Also when the worldbuilding and plot basically is "here's some not so thinly veiled racism between groups who will set that aside to fight a common enemy." Series ends on a high note, but you know this world will fall into disarray again cause people suck, so like, what was the point.

This is specific to the videogame-ish sub-genre, mostly Isakeis…

But you go out of the way to include RPG mechanics into your story… but the only real influence it has on the storytelling is spending an inordinate amount of time grinding… a mechanic explicitly added to RPGs to pad the game.

There are good video game based stories, Survival Story of a Sword King and Dungeon Reset both immediately come to mind… but I feel like this is a widespread problem.

Yep!

More than 17 apostrophes on the first page with every name of a person, place, or thing having one.

Treating wands like guns in fights instead of using spells creatively