We don't need villains to do that, it's what we're doing now. A crime boss could work. He could be using his position to eliminate the competition, legally of course. I think it was the TV series The Shield which had a main character doing that.
One I've come across far too much recently is 'You were a Princess all along!' As if that's the only thing that really matters.
Yep, I get this. It happens in Sci-Fi too, though, to be honest. I'm reading a little ditty right now called Kirith Kirin: The City Behind the Stars (fantasy), and the POV MC of the book, Jessex, does seem to be quite the focus of his little universe. Though the book is good, Jessex is suffering from a fatal case of "chosen one" syndrome. Yes, it all happens to him. All of it. His universe is Jessex-centric and the stars and planets dance to the whims of his gravitational pull. Oddly, though, the title of the book is the name of another character, Kirith Kirin, who is the soon-to-be king and, of course, becomes Jessex's Chris-or-Liam-Hemsworth-beautiful lover, because, again, Jessex is the head of the pin upon which all the angels dance.
I think you see a lot of Chosen Ones in YA fantasy especially, because at that age, you tend to feel like everything is happening to you. Your emotions are a mess, and everything becomes an instant crisis. So, there's a lot of appeal to readers at that age in being not just the one to whom all the bad things are happening, but also the one who can fix everything and save the day.
What are your "pet peeves" in the fantasy genre? War, as if every conflict has to climax in the big battle finale. Fae - sorry fae fans, why couldn't they just say fairies? For whatever reason "fae" annoyed me from the first time I heard the name. Also, zombies that have talking roles. They're supposed to be brain dead, people. Making a woman who is semi-normal except she has to eat brains, or the zombie that is someone's love interest? So unappealing.
Actually, I've read some interesting stuff where zombies were more than just meat robots. Terry Pratchett treated zombies as people who weren't slowed down by little things like death, and the zombies in the Xanth novels became more human when you treated them like people instead of things. As for Fae vs Fairies? "Fairy" is a relatively new term, deriving from "Faerie", the land of the "Fae." Yes, the former is the more common modern term, but a lot of authors are nitpicky research types (myself included).
Yep. Totally agreed. Yes, I know it's a real word. Yes. I know. No one needs to point me to definitions or encyclopedia articles on the topic. I - know - it's - a - real - word. Regardless, it feels contrived and self-conscious and (for Brits) terribly twee.
I don't mind "fae," probably because I encountered it in plenty of books I read before the term came to be more trendy. I tend to associate it with authors who are using a darker version of faerie, more related to some of the ancient tales of them than something Disney put together. Ever read Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood sequence? He does a nice job (can't recollect whether he uses the word fae or fairy at all in those books, but they're the sort of thing that make me think of fae, as are certain works by the likes of Ramsey Campbell or Charles de Lint, as opposed to the term fairy, which makes me think more of glitter and rainbows).
I just looked up "fae" on the Oxford Concise English Dictionary (software version), and the definition it came up with was for faeces. Do what you will with that information. Carry on.
As Steerpike said, I've always considered Fae to be more of a trickster, insect-like, bite-y little bugger, than your traditional sparkly fairy. But its use does sound somewhat affected these days.
Actually, that's not true. The original zombies weren't dead people, nor eat brains. They were originally brain damaged slaves. And the term undead originally referred to those inflicted by witchcraft or other means and weren't dead (ie zombies).
Actually, I believe the term originated with Haitian Voodoo. In Haitian, Zombi means "spirit of the dead." In Voodoo culture there are two paths of belief - the way of balance, or the way of imbalance. Bokors, the sorcers of imbalance or black magic, believed that with a spell they could bring people back from the dead. Thus we get our modern notion of a zombie being a dead person living. It does have slave ties, however. If I remember right, Africans brought to Haiti as part of the slave trade felt that their only escape from slavery was to kill themselves. But they were afraid to do so, because they believed that one could come back from the dead, but still being dead, and would therefore be a slave forever and ever. So in that regard the idea of a zombie did enter Haitian Voodoo culture from the slaves, but it was the Bokor with their black magic that made the zombies as we know them today. Either way, I am sick of zombie culture. It's everywhere and frankly, it's tired. I'm ready to move on. I know this isn't fantasy, but thinking of zombies made me think of classic horror and I thought of Frankenstein. It bugs me so much that people refer to the monster as Frankenstein. Small pet peeve, but one nonetheless.
I just finished reading Allegiant (third Divergent book) and that's what spawned this hatred. lol I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but what you described is exactly what happens in this book. Even though it's told from Tris and Four's perspectives, everything happens to Tris. Her mother was special, her father was special, her ancestors were special, her brother was a jerk. I guess Four had a few issues too but not nearly as much as Tris, and it drove me crazy. Not to mention, the plot and the writing was truly god awful, but that's besides the point.. Yanno, when I first started my WIP Exaltation, I used to love "special ancestry." My MC was the daughter of the previous queen and a God, both of which she found out about in the book. But after reading Allegiant, it really struck me as to how annoying it is. I'm glad I reworked my WIP (now called Desolate) so that my MC has normal parents, though one is a spy.
Though, if handled well, the Special Ancestry can make for an interesting "sins of the father" story.
I understand that authors have to keep the conflicts coming because reading a book about how a nice girl lives with her nice family and goes to a nice school and gets nice grades and dates a nice boy just sounds really boring. On the other hand, I get your point there, for one, it seems improbable everything happens to one character. Also, constantly victimizing the protagonist can come off cheap, as if by throwing shit at him/her, s/he becomes somehow automatically more sympathetic. There's a difference between the protagonist overcoming an obstacle and growing in the process (meaning, they don't come out unscathed and untouched), which is great, and using obstacles to merely keep the reader's interest or to fish for pity from the reader/make the character seem annoyingly saint-like, which I don't like. E.g. Something to that effect happened in the Deed of Paksenarrion. Not my cup of tea.
The idea that an entire sentient species can be treated as "The Villain" rather than individuals within that species. I don't care if particular characters think that the conflict is Humans versus Non-Humans*, but the narrative had better make it clear that the actual conflict is between Good humans and Good non-humans on one side versus Evil humans and Evil non-humans on the other. *I write a lot more sci-fi than fantasy, but one of my favorite tricks for distinguishing human psychology from non-human psychology should work just as well for fantasy races as it does for aliens: The Hat of the human species is that we feel the need to assign Hats to other races and/or species, that nobody else sees conflict in terms of Group vs. Group to the same degree that we do. Feel free to plagiarize
@Simpson17866 I like the idea. In my current WiP the only "racial" tension is between the humans, who predominate, and the one non-human race on the planet. And it is pretty much driven by the human side of the equation. I don't mind an evil race per se, if the author adequately explains it. For example, you may have a sentient race created by evil sorcery and somehow corrupted, that sort of thing. But the author really has to do a good job for me to go along with it in most cases.
Yeah, I never understand the entirely evil race, unless they are non-sentient Terminator (not a race) or Borg types (not a race). It really does suggest a lack of subtlety in your writing if there are two distinct sides without any shades of grey, particularly if those sides are defined as "good" and "evil". Unfortunately fantasy often seems to revolve around these very clear distinctions.
Not as much in the last 15 years or so. "Gray" morality gritty fantasy is en vogue. You can follow it back a lot further than that, of course, but you had one or two such examples and a lot of absolute good/evil fantasy around it, whereas now the gray stuff predominates it seems. A cool book, if you don't mind a fantasy that takes a Tolkien-like world but turns the perspective of good and evil races, a dark lord, etc., on its head is Banewreaker, by Jacqueline Carey.
Most of the "evil races" (though, really, they're species, not races) *mostly* make sense. At least, in what I've read. LOTR's orcs were created by Sauron, who was Middle Earth's devil. The dragon-goblin-things from Dragonlance were created the same way. In that context, where it's explicitly stated that they are evil/demonic/corrupt in origin, it makes sense. It's a cheap device, but it makes sense.
