• Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Being forbidden doesn’t make a relationship interesting. The Romeo and Juliet thing has been spun a million times, and every one of them is shit including the original.

  • The Overseer@sh.itjust.works
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    7 months ago

    Its for the reader/watcher to decide what is canon it maybe good if done subtly but if its some important or core lore, well then i should’ve just imagined the whole thing why are you needed ?

  • spittingimage@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • GrayBackgroundMusic@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

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

      I’m just the opposite. I like magic systems that are basically alternative physics. Gimme some of that inherent plausibility Brandon Sanderson.

    • simple@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      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.

      For real. There has to be a better use of elves other than “they live in the woods and appreciate nature and hate dark elves or night elves or whatever your story calls them”

    • Frozengyro@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Me reading the wheel of time:

      • The Chosen One ✓ the main male characters, but definitely Rand

      • The Wise Yet Enigmatic Sage ✓Moiraine

      • The Sharp-Tongued Princess. ✓Nynaeve

      • The Rogue With A Heart of Gold. ✓Mat

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

      • Gods that slot into neat roles on a godly table of elements. ✓The forsaken all having distinct methods to get to the top

      • Magic systems so detailed and prosaic you may as well call them technology. ✓The one power

      • Elves ✓Warders

      All that said, I’m still enjoying the series thus far.

      • StereoTrespasser@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I honestly don’t understand the appeal of Robert Jordan. I made it through 50 pages of The Eye of the World before throwing it into the nearest little library. By then I had uncovered every fantasy cliche known to man, made even worse by the writing style of a 12 year-old.

        • theherk@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I started that book over and over and just could not do it. But then my dad convinced me to read it further. I did. Got hooked by book three, and then got stuck in a loop of reading the series on repeat. Love it.

        • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          The Eye of the World suffers from being a fantasy work published in its era, when publishers wanted Lord of the Rings. So it’s basically Lord of the Rings. Chock-full of cliches because that’s what got published. The series gets significantly better from there on.

          Jordan wasn’t without his shortcomings as a writer, but he was very good at two things I find most appealing in a fantasy author: worldbuilding and hard magic systems. This is the same reason I love Brandon Sanderson, despite his (comparatively) weak prose against someone like, say, Rothfuss.

          He also, when he knew he was dying, managed to outline enough of his planned ending that another author was able to take it up and write the final three books of his series after he died, which is a really cool gesture for his fans.

    • Granite@kbin.social
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      7 months ago

      Now I want to read a fantasy comedy where someone trying to make cookies from an ancient recipe is whisked off on an adventure to fulfill the prophecy, but they just want snickerdoodles dammit.

    • snooggums@midwest.social
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      7 months ago

      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.

      I was expecting a joke about Star Wars: A New Hope later in the post!

      Yeah, those have all been done to death in novels and I’m sick of the reluctant chosen one the most.

    • snooggums@midwest.social
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      7 months ago

      A tavern is a perfect place to meet strangers. It is a social hangout where new things are bound to be found!

      The problem is always starting an adventure by interacting with a mysterious stranger they have no reason to trust. Why isn’t Aunt Elovynn sending them on their way from a family get together? Or the religious leader that the characters know and trust giving them a start?

    • VelvetStorm@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Tavern is a perfect place to meet, though it’s neutral ground and it’s public. Most people won’t start shit in public.

  • simple@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    Zero consistency to magic systems. I get it, having all sorts of spells in the story is fun and gives a lot of creative ways to make fights more interesting, but…

    • If teleportation magic exists, why don’t people who own it teleport everywhere?

    • If time travel magic exists, why isn’t everyone doing everything in their power to get it and use it? Looking at you, harry potter.

    • The villains usually have spells that are supposed to be ultra powerful and can kill anyone quickly but somehow it doesn’t work against main characters and there’s no excuse for why fights drag on for so long. Imagine seeing the villain introduced by vaporizing someone but never seeing them do it again.

    • Main character(s) breaking the rules of magic just because…

    I’m a fan of stories like Avatar the last airbender or Witch Hat Atelier because their magic is very consistent. It makes things way more interesting when a character can’t just pull something out of their ass to save them in the middle of a fight.

    • callouscomic@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Same reasons I find extended comic universes to be appalling. Why don’t superheroes just use all of their powers all the time? Why isn’t the more powerful superhero conveniently here right now? Why do we have to pretend there is a struggle?

      The minute 2 or more superheroes are put together, it’s basically ruined cause all their powers are only used as convenient for the story.

    • Fat Tony@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I feel like the best “magic system” has to be the alchemy used in Full Metal Alchemist. Given they treat it more like a science and there are some very clear ground rules regarding alchemy.

      To those that don’t know. In FMA, you can use Alchemy to create new matter out of old matter as long as it’s equal in value. For instance if you want to make a wooden table with alchemy, you can but you would need to have a proper amount of wood to actually make it (otherwise it would be either a very tiny or very unstable table). So now ask yourself, what would it take to actually create a human person?

    • K3zi4@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      One of the things I enjoy most about Sanderson’s work is his attention to detail in his numerous magic systems.

      • owenfromcanada@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        And the imaginative variety. The magic system in the Mistborn series was fantastic and unlike anything I had ever read or even imagined. And then he adapted it consistently to an industrial age, and somehow made it work. Respect to Sanderson.

    • GrayBackgroundMusic@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      If teleportation magic exists, why don’t people who own it teleport everywhere?

      Another wizard and I absolutely wrecked our DM’s in game economy just teleporting everywhere. Wizard Instant Shipping Inc.

    • GrayBackgroundMusic@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Shoutout to every story that alludes to the fact that mages can run out of mana but is insanely inconsistent how and when it happens. Sometimes they spam spells for hours and sometimes it’s just “Oh no, I can’t use [spell] anymore because… Um… The plot says I can’t!”

      hhahahaa, just like reload when dramatically appropriate.

    • NJSpradlin@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Harry Potter was the worst culprit for a lot of these. The author was just writing a fun story that she threw together wildly. She didn’t care about consistency in magic… which is the UNDERLYING PREMISE OF THE ENTIRE STORY. But, cool it’s a Coming Of Age story with a mix of the Hero’s Journey in there, and a few odds and ends from other stories and mediums. There’s enough fun to suspend disbelief… but, upon further inspection you wish you just hadn’t inspected further.

      • callouscomic@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        The series goes from “magic wands require extreme responsibility and must be used carefully,” to machine gun wands.

      • simple@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        I can give the first half of Harry Potter a slack because it’s pretty laid back and whimsical. As soon as it tries to take itself seriously it kind of falls apart for me. God, deathly hallows sucked.

        • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
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          7 months ago

          I stopped reading after the 4th book at release. Never really had interest in picking up the next couple of books.

          When my interest in “well, might as well give it a go again” started back up, JKR started to go insane and now I don’t want to have anything to do with the series anymore

          • MrsDoyle@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            I remember when all the controversy started I thought wow, this must be exaggerated somehow, and sought out what she had actually said. Oh. My. Fucking. God. When she was challenged she didn’t just double down, she quadrupled down, and then some. Loathsome woman, just awful.

            • xkforce@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              Why couldnt she just fuck off to a tropical island and stay off twitter? Same thing with notch (guy that created minecraft)

          • NJSpradlin@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            I was reading the books religiously through middle and high school, as the movies were coming out… but, the movies finally caught up with the books for me, for some reason I didn’t get around to reading the last one before the movie. Anyway, I’ve NEVER gotten back to it. I’ve tried, but the magic is gone. The author is outspokenly uninclusive while her books, the original world she built, is all about inclusivity. I can’t fathom how separate and different her works are from her blatant bigotry. Fucking. What.

            • BottleOfAlkahest@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              For a woman who wrote “it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.” She seems awful fucking concerned with what categroies people were born into.

              If only there was an epic saga about the conquering power of love over bigotry that she could read. Maybe one involving a boy who lives or some fantastic magical beasts?

              • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                “It matters not what someone is born” is a very unfair sentence, what you are born can set the difficulty level of your life to extra easy or infinite pain regardless of your will and efforts. The anti-suicide nets off the windows of the iphone factories are not there for people born in a rich family.

      • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        Eliezer Yudkowsky can be a bit preachy at times, but he did a good job of pulling on threads in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to try to get to a fairly consistent model of magic

    • GraniteM@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      There’s a thing I heard somewhere about how your magical system needs to have a balance between how well it’s understood vs. how useful it is, or else it will break the plot.

      If a magic system is extremely useful, then it must also be extremely mysterious, so that you can say “Well, it can’t immediately fix all problems because the gods work in mysterious ways.” Gandalf or Tom Bombadil seem incredibly powerful, but they don’t solve all of the problems in Middle Earth, and that’s okay because they’re terribly mysterious.

      If a magic system is extremely well understood in-universe, then it has to have hard limits on how useful it is, so you can say something like “Well, the Law of Equivalent Exchange says that to solve all our problems would require a blood sacrifice of the entire population, so that’s not an option.”

      If your magic is pretty well-understood AND very useful, then by all rights it OUGHT to solve all your problems, and when it doesn’t then readers rightly begin to question why any of the plot needs to happen at all (see, for example, the time turners in Harry Potter).

  • grasshopper_mouse@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    I dunno if it’s considered “bad”, but I personally hate when one of the characters gets amnesia, or the group meets a character that has amnesia. It just feels like a laziness by the author who can’t think of any other way to make a storyline interesting.

    • Anyolduser@lemmynsfw.com
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      7 months ago

      By modern standards this is pretty bad, and it boils down to an exposition problem.

      The author needs to explain certain basic information up front (or at least pretty early on). A good way to do this is to have one character be a novice who needs to be told basic details, thereby informing the audience. In fact the “new guy” angle to exposition delivery is so good that it itself is becoming cliche.

      In the example you brought up the author wanted to take advantage of the “new guy” trope but for whatever could not do that. Maybe the character needed social status or standing that a rookie would not have in order to make the plot work. Rather than find a creative workaround that made sense in their story they pulled out the old amnesia trick to eat their cake and have it, too.

    • IvanOverdrive@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      One book that did it well was Nine Princes in Amber. It worked because the readers got to discover the “real world” along with the main character. Without it there would’ve been a shit ton of exposition of a detailed setting that didn’t rely on Tolkien at all, one that the MC was already familiar with. Although it might have been fresh in 1970 and overdone since then.

  • Wooster@startrek.website
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    7 months ago

    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.

    • Hadriscus@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      Oh yes…this is SO lazy. There’s this immense potential for creative choreography that’s left untapped. Directors should really consult dungeon masters for this kind of stuff

      • Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        There’s a meme floating around that suggests taking inspiration for wand using from conductors and I cannot stress how amazing every fight in Harry potter would have been if this was the standard.

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      They actually pull this off well in Frieren. There are tons of different and unique spells but the one the MC always uses is the basic magic attack spell because she is stupidly overpowered she doesn’t need to be creative.

      • VelvetStorm@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        To me that is lazy writing. Specfic spells should have a set damage unless they are upcast. Maybe this is just the dnd player in me that thinks that though.

        • Contramuffin@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          To be clear, the magic system in this world is essentially technology. There is a set input and a destined output. The MC simply doesn’t care about fighting to learn any advanced fighting spells and just gatling-gun-spams the weakest attack spell until the opponent gets exhausted.

          This ends up being brought up later, since a mage who’s sufficiently trained in fighting supposedly has a fair chance of defeating the MC. It’s a bit of a theme throughout the show about juggling the practical fighting applications of magic vs. the mundane but fun uses of magic

        • helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I think the other person doesn’t word it well. First, the fighting isn’t the main plot of the story, its more about everything in between. The MCs are powerful, but still need to be careful in their fights. or they will die.

          The story doesn’t want dragon ball fights that are 20 chapters long, or have an impassible monster that de-rail the goal for 20 more chapters. Their obsticals are more about the world and people they interact with.

          The magic combat system is pretty well thought out, but not complex.

          The MC basically has lots of mana. That’s their “op” trait. They developed a stragedy to spam cast the basic damage spell.

          I’m making up some numbers here to kind of paint a picture of how this “basic spell” work.

          Attack spell =

          • 1 second cast time
          • 1 damage to defence spell
          • 10/10 damage to unprotected person. (Can do 9/10 depending on what the plot needs)
          • Can be cast in a variety of directions. (I.e it’s not a gun, its a targeted missle)
          • cost more mana than the defence spell.

          Defence spell =

          • .5 second cast
          • Can absorb 100 hits
          • low mana cost for small area over a short period of time, high cost to do “full coverege”. Its essentially a sheild they move around and resize to block attacks as they come. Fully protecting yourself burns too much mana and you’d lose.

          For most hitting the defence spell a hundred times is a stupid stratagy, so everyone came up with different spells that break through it in a few hits.

          Out MC instead trained the basic spell so much, they can cast it 20 times a second over a long period of time. This forces the opponent to burn mana trying to maintain defence. The opponent is overwhelmed and get hit. However the stratagy only works if they back the openent into a postion where they can’t counterattack or have a buddy attack MC from behind.

          • VelvetStorm@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            So its kinda like they have infinite level 1 spell slots and they are just spaming magic missile over and over?

            • helpImTrappedOnline@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              Pretty much, yes, but infinate isn’t quite true.

              (The magic system isn’t DnD, so I’m spending way too much time making up a lot of shit here to give a general idea that no one really asked for. (And because its fun to brutely mash one magic system into another)).

              Let’s say your average mid to high level mage has 100x spell slots (and for now assume all other stats are also equal). In this system, there are no spell levels. Instead, more complex spells require more slots to be used at once.

              The basic defence and attack spell are 1 to 10. 1 defence spell blocks 10 basic attacks. However, you can’t attack and defend at the same time, and 1 defence is only for a small area. Full 360° coverage would cost a lot of slots per second. You conserve slots by precicly blocking the opponents spells as they come.

              To break the defence you need to to be able to hit it really hard and follow up before they can cast more defence or counter attack. To do more damage in a spell, it costs more slots. This is where things like the other stats, skills, refelx time, unique spells, and combat stratagy become deciding factors in fights. Slot count also varies, a young mage might start of with one slot, but can become a very high level mage with 300 slots.

              MC has 200 slots to start with and trained to get a very fast cast per second rate for both basic attack and defence. They are so proficient in the spell, it’s the equivelent effort of you or me walking.

              While MC’s magic mistle does little damage, they can cast the spell 20 times in a second from multiple directions. This forces opponents to use up all their slots to defend until they run out or get overwhelmed by the numbers. The only defence is to do 360 defence, which can’t be maintained for long. (For simplicity sake, assume all the magic is a one shot kill. If you don’t defend or dodge, you die).

              To make things more fun, MC has no idea they are insanly strong because their only reference growing up was their mentor who has the 5000 slot cheat code.

              Yes, I am over thinking this. And yes, I should be sleeping right now.

    • zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Bringing Harry Potter into this, the fact that they showed they do know how to do this, when Dumbledore and Voldemort fought in the 5th movie, makes it all the more annoying that almost every other fight in the series was just shooting blasts and energy beams at each other

      • TheDoozer@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Except, of all people, those idiots Crabbe and Goyle busting out a living dragon made of fire. I mean, they shouldn’t have, but they managed it.

        Nothing but direct strikes from aurors and death eaters.

  • owenfromcanada@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    The Chosen One somehow discovering some new thing at the climax of any big conflict.

    I’m looking at you, Sword of Truth.

    • theherk@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Throwing out peripeteia / anagnorisis would kind of ruin a massive portion of fictional literature.

      • owenfromcanada@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        I’m not against it as a general rule, it’s just frustrating when it’s overused–ends up feeling like a deus ex machina thing.

        • theherk@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I think I generally agree. But it is like most the other things in the thread. The plot mechanic is fine when done well and bad when done poorly or as a cop out.

          So I think most of us just hate shitty storytelling.

    • Hasherm0n@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      I started off really enjoying the series, but eventually had to abandon it as he kept adding increasingly over the strawmen who’s sole purpose was to be blown away by the might of Randian Objectivism.

    • Buglefingers@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      The series is so long, which part are you referring to? Lmao it is one of my favorites still though.

      (I’m pretty sure in a bunch of cases he uses magic to resolve stuff but never understands what he’s doing and most of the time can’t replicate it)

      Also have you read sword of justice series?

      • owenfromcanada@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Most of the series past the first book is what I was referring to. It seemed like, for at least several books, there’s some big climax and he suddenly rediscovers some lost aspect of War Magic that saves the day, mostly unrelated to the rest of the book. It’s been over a decade since I read them though, so I might not be remembering it right.

        Still enjoyed the series as a whole, despite a few things. Haven’t read sword of justice, but I might give it a try.

        • Buglefingers@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          Its been quite some time since I read them as well, but you aren’t wrong. Well I’ve a host of recommendations if you ever need any!

  • Cyyy@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    girls falling in love with the main character and wanting to stay with him for the rest of the story just because they have met random.

  • Vanth@reddthat.com
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    7 months ago

    This seems like the audience for the Bulwer-Lytton competiton, in which “participants write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written.”

    2023 Grand Prize winner submission:

    She was a beautiful woman; more specifically she was the kind of beautiful woman who had an hourlong skincare routine that made her look either ethereal or like a glazed donut, depending on how attracted to her you were.

    I’ve been rewatching the Alien movies and this one got a small giggle out of me, from the 2021 competition:

    Believe it or not Ripley refrained from firing her laser at the alien creature lurking in the starship’s ceiling above the crew’s happy hour gathering, its dripping secretions burning through the titanium floor like it was made of cheap wet toilet paper, when she discovered by sheer accident that just one drop of the oozing substance reacted with the contents of her cocktail glass to produce a martini so perfect that 007 himself would have betrayed Queen and country for just one sip, as long as it was shaken and not stirred.

    • Vanth@reddthat.com
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      7 months ago

      This one nails a very real trope I dislike; ridiculous proper “fantasy” names:

      In obedience to the Thousand-year Mandate of Hawksrealm, following the prophecy of Glenfrik the Morrowsayer, Klagnar and his (thus far) loyal Deathsword Warriors journeyed countless skyturns across the Burning Plains of Hellsplat and the Great Eastern Doomsea to an immense, shining folkshive that more or less resembled Fresno, but with a more genre-appropriate name.

      • swordsmanluke@programming.dev
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        7 months ago

        While I agree with you on the whole, there are some real world places with names that go hard.

        Like Dead Man’s Pass, Oregon. Or Devil’s Gate, Utah.

        …Maybe it’s just a Western US thing.

      • harrys_balzac@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 months ago

        This is my favorite pet peeve. I got through 6 pages of a fantasy novel where the writer spent multiple paragraphs describing alcohol made from potatoes and then called it “voka.”

        Those 6 pages hit on every trope possible. Not even in an entertaining way. It took itself way too seriously.

  • Remmock@kbin.social
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    7 months ago

    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.

  • xkforce@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Women and girls usually end up in a relationship by the end of the story and/or are the ones needing to be rescued. Its formulaic, boring and sexist due to the comparative lack of the opposite occurring. eg. men needing to be rescued.

    Like… even if you did not give a single shit about sexism, its the same tired plot points over and over again. It has Hallmark channel writer energy. Create a second plot I beg you.

    • GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
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      7 months ago

      I agree with you on principle, but i feel it has reached a point where the circumvention of the classic tropes has created a new and also very formulaic stereotype: the “empowering“ woman. Must be strong, butch, evidently better than men in something typically associated with men, and if by any chance she is permitted to be classically feminine she must either be a lesbian or emotionally fucked up somehow. Bonus points for leather jacket and shades.

      It is probably the better trope but i find it similarly boring at this point. Very performative and often with little relevance to the story being told.

      • starman@programming.dev
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        7 months ago

        Must be strong, butch, evidently better than men

        And this writing style often results in complete lack of character development. Because how would you develop a character that is ideal from the start?

      • bluGill@kbin.social
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        7 months ago

        That one is worse in my mind as baring steroids men will be physically larger and stronger than women. women should have motivetions other than marry a strong man (nothing wrong with wanting a good husband, I know many young girls looking for one - but please don’t be the cardboard that is all I want)

      • VelvetStorm@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        They also can’t have any scars on their face that could make them less attractive. Hester shaw from the predator city books had her fucking nose cut off and the scar also took off some her her top lip yet in the fucking dog shit movie they made she looks like this

        • callouscomic@lemm.ee
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          7 months ago

          Now, to be fair, in the Punisher TV show they also refused to make pretty boy Jigsaw actor look as fucked up as his face really SHOULD have looked according to the comics.

          Also why some characters that NEED to be wearing masks or helmets conveniently are not. Like in race cars or in space. Or the face protection is unrealistic so we can still mostly see them.

          There’s also some funny times where comic characters who can’t breathe in space are merely wearing a small covering of the mouth, and maybe nose, but not eyes/ears.

          • emptybamboo@midwest.social
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            7 months ago

            I think it might be partially prettiness but I think it is mostly practicality. If the makeup is that difficult, it will take hours every day to put on. It can be hell on the actors. I remember reading about Peter Ustinov who played Hercule Poirot in “Murder on the Orient Express” but refused to do it for “Death on the Nile” because he did not want to have to wear that makeup in Egypt.

            You have to make sure complicated makeup always looks consistent. It would have been really hard to do that in a series over multiple years.

            One other example I can think of is Katniss in The Hunger Games. If you read the novel, her body was REALLY broken. I think her entire body was covered in burn scars. It would have been very hard to do that in the film consistently (though I will note that in the novels, the scars are not on her face. I saw it as symbolic of the inner scars of the Games).

            So I think it is partially aesthetic but mostly practical.

    • Cuberoot@lemmynsfw.com
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      7 months ago

      I recently read a collection of novels by a prominent 1960s science fiction writer. In three novels and 400 pages, I don’t think there was a single female character who advanced the plot other than by sexually entertaining a male character (Despite one of the books having a female title character, and another had a lot of minor female characters.) I know it’s a product of its era, but even then, there were more woman PhDs than men who’d been to space, so I think a good science fiction author ought to be able to at least imagine the possibility. I have nothing against female sexuality, but the most interesting women supplement it with some other talent.

      • Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        It was the 1960s dude, if he’d written a novel with an empowered woman he probably would have been arrested and sent to Vietnam

  • VelvetStorm@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Elves always being like the bottom rung of society or them being the outcasts. It’s insane to think that elves wouldn’t be the rulers of dam near any government or at the very least not be the power and influence behind a puppet government. Who wouldn’t want the help of a race of people who, depending on the lore, can live for thousands of years.

    I mean, there could be an elf that has been a friend of your family for like 5 or more generations. That sounds dope as fuck for us but kinda shitty for them.

    • BestBouclettes@jlai.lu
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      7 months ago

      I like what Tolkien did with the elves. They went from a warmongering bloodthirsty species to ancient and wise and they decided to gtfo and live on a secluded island out of reach from pretty much everyone.

      • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Well there’s also the whole “The One Ring is the only thing still keeping the elves’ magic alive, so they know that destroying the One Ring will inevitably lead to the end of the elves” side of things. That’s why all the elves in LOTR are so fucking morbid about everything. The elves rely on magic, and while it did a lot of damage and was undoubtedly evil, the One Ring bound that magic to Middle Earth because it was the same magic Sauron used to appear in Middle Earth. So by helping to destroy the One Ring (and breaking Sauron’s tether to Middle Earth) they’re also destroying the only thing keeping their magic from drying up over time. They’re inadvertently starting a ticking time bomb for themselves.

        At least, that’s what I remember off the top of my head. It could be completely wrong, but I’m too lazy to google it.