Avoiding the rehashed themes/plots/mechanics of Fantasy

If you want some series which go beyond the norm in fantasy, try things like the comic Battle Chaser, which is very bizarre and artsy but also shows how a world where magic and steampunk tech exists would be astronomically different than our own. It would be more like Star Wars than Game of Thrones, with giant robots and magic shields and mystic nukes and such. Warhammer Fantasy, especially back in the olden days, and Warcraft also show this. Gunpowder, energy weapons, airships, giant war machines--all perfectly logical in a world with magic, explained away by sorcery, and changing the dynamic in a way "normal" High Fantasy doesn't.

Kind of an offshoot but also, for Superhero Fantasy, try to Youngblood series by Rob Liefeld. Don't let youtube personalities who "review" comics by screaming incoherently online tell you otherwise, Rob Liefield had some really out-there ideas. One of which being that, if superhumans existed, they would be closer to celebrity athletes than the Justice League. Also there would be virtually no government oversight--what government could control a being like Barry Allen? Or Kal-El, or Bruce Banner? They can do anything they want and normal humans are utterly impotent to stop them. Youngblood and other early Image comics explored this in a great way and long before the MCU took the idea and ran with it.

 

The discussion was about whether he said Romeo & Juliet is a romance. Romeo and Juliet being the "it" in the quote from you below.

 

Oh, yeah. My bad. I'm just not doing well in this important forensic thread dissection. So I'll lay it out:

Romance is a genre. It is also a primary sub-genre descriptor in other genres and is a general tag that people apply to fiction that feels romantic.

Steerpike mentioned romance, then Twilight. Twilight is not a Romance, but a Fantasy with romantic leanings. He then mentioned a Tragedy (R&J), known to be considered romantic, and explained how Twilight, another Not Romance, referred to as a romance, borrowed a romantic trope from it.

Did Steerpike explicitly say "R&J is a romance." No. Neither Twilight or R&J are said explicitly to be romances - they are just treated that way in the statement. My point is that I didn't bring up R&J as a romance, but Steerpike did (inadvertently?) by putting it in a paragraph about "many romances" and linking it to the romantic Twilight. So I'm not trying to put words in Steerpikes mouth, but he put an idea out there that I followed up on.

'Kay?

 

I don't agree. Twilight is pretty firmly within the Romance genre. That's the dominant element. R&J is not a romance.

 

I took a look at the website. Interestingly, he doesn't consider SciFi or Fantasy as genres, and I can kind of see his point.

But I can also disagree with it: I've read (in books specifically on writing SciFi ) that SF/F readers are distinctly different from non-SF/F readers, and I've encountered the differences the books talk about myself in alpha readers. For example, SF/F readers will typically give you more time to build your world, and tolerate more unexplained things for longer as a consequence, than non-SF/F readers. You can almost get away with an opening line like "Garvon snargled the foopka for the fifth time, but their shtova was still cranched" with SF/F readers, for example. No one else over the age of five would put up with that nonsense.

So if he's talking about writing to reader's expectations, and doesn't recognize that SF/F readers have different expectations, that's potentially a flaw in his methodology. Any comment on that, that might help me (an SF writer) decide whether to buy his book?

 

You can even argue that R&J doesn't even contain romance: just pubescent hormones on overdrive, which is no more "romantic" than Jim Steinman's classic Paradise by the Dashboard Light, that Meatloaf performed:

I couldn't take it any longer
Lord I was crazed
And then the feeling came upon me like a tidle wave
started swearing to my God and on my mother's grave
that I'd love you 'til the end of time
I swore
I'd love you to the end of time.

So - now - I'm
Praying for the end of time
to hurry up and arrive
cause if I gotta spend another minutes with you,
I don't think that I can really survive.
​

Not romance. Not romantic. Just teenage lust and foolishness.

 

I would argue that Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy with romantic elements, and Twilight is a romance with fantasy/horror elements.

I might lose the argument, but that's my position.

 

Na, ah! Twilight is a Young Adult coming of age!

Nope, Twilight is Gothic Romance!

Uh, uh. Twilight is Fantasy!

 

I never understood the hate everyone had for Twilight but I like drama-laden teen romances so whatever--well, let me rephrase that, all of the arthouse types had for Twilight since the PUBLIC actually ate it up. But here I go again letting the desires of the public who actually pay money for entertainment decide what "good" and "bad" entertainment is, instead of letting abstract hyper-subjective arthouse types decide for them.

 

Romance is a very broad genre that can contain loads of different elements. You can have Fantasy Romance, Historical Romance, Contemporary Romance, YA Romance, Literary Romance, etc. Just because a book fits into the Romance genre doesn't mean it can't fit into another genre as well. As I understand Twilight (haven't actually read it myself) it fits into the Romance genre even if it fits Fantasy or YA as well.

R&J is right out, though.

 

For sci-fi

Drafts where the character loves coffee..
Drafts of blue-collar vessels returning Tungsten from deep space...for the corporation..
Space Marines...

All drafts...she looked out the window, THEN SHE BREATHED...nnnnnnnghhh

 

I agree on your points. However I think the main question here is related to those things you see in Every book. The poster referred to orcs I think because it's an top of the head thing in fantasy novels. You can find little in fantasy that doesn't have orcs in it, or the very least orcs are a majority.

And you already explained the reason why orcs are the majority. But I think the main overused tropes is as you touched on, is plot descriptions that reak of unoriginality such as catching a damsel in distress. Its happens so much. However you touched on the point again that these things work for a reason.

Every person reading a romance either wants to be the damsel or the hero in that story and they want to be the one who falls or is fallen for. They hardly care if it's reused 100 times. I'd have to say that getting something published that doesn't contain these overused scenes will be very hard as honestly, it would be quite boring.

That said, there is still a market for the original not so dramatic story. I once had the fancy that I wished I could watch a anime or movie about little life moments that a group of people share. Not a sitcom or a dramatic comedy, just life playing out with a touch of the surreal, because I think it would be fascinating to read or watch how somebody is portrayed in a omniscient way. Such as if a guy asks s girl out and she says no but you find out her reasons isn't because of what he thought. Not in some dramatic twist but in a normal real world fashion.

Still Every story needs drama and pace or it is literally going nowhere. Without a driving force in the book the reader will have a hard time getting through it as it will feel them with a sense of "whats the point" mindset

 

I believe this is completely false and displays a lack of familiarity with the genre. Not only are fantasy books containing orcs in the minority, it’s a fairly small minority.

 

Well, no. I'm pretty confident that the list of "fantasy without orcs" would be far, far longer than the list of "fantasy with orcs".

Is it possible that the only kind of fantasy you like is the kind that tends to have orcs, and thus there's self-selection going on?

 

Indeed. I pretty well read fantasy exclusively and the only books I've read with orcs in them are Tolkien books.

 

Oh, crap. I was so sure "fantasy" was an Armenian word that meant "with orcs".


Crushing.

 

There's a bazillion Forgotten Realm books out there that include orcs; they are based on D&D. I think maybe the Dragonlance books are too. And they are popular: Forgotten Realms includes the 34 NYT best sellers that R.A. Salvatore wrote about his dark elf, Dritzz (which I may have misspelled), for example.

That said, I haven't read a lot of them. And they don't make up a majority of fantasy books. Heck, not even YA vampire books do that.

 

I'm not trying to say that because I haven't read them there aren't myriad orc books. But in regards to: "You can find little in fantasy that doesn't have orcs in it, or the very least orcs are a majority." I've got a great many years of fantasy books under my belt, and very few of them have contained orcs.

 

The Wind in the Willows, The Princess of Mars, Conan The Barbarian, Winnie the Pooh, etc. are all fantasy books without orcs. Maybe they're not all what we think of when we think of fantasy, but they're fantasy nonetheless.

 

And I'm not saying you were saying that. I was supplementing your response (as the last sentences sort of makes clear) not disagreeing with it. Me saying "X" in response to your post doesn't imply you said "not X." So, we cool?

 

And if there's orcs in Xanth, Harry Potter, or Narnia, I don't remember them.

 

Well, seeing as you used underlined and bold text, I suppose so.

 

I've been trained to bold or underline "not" -- it's of outsized importance for such a little word, and you don't want people to miss it; especially in the (non-fiction) documents I write for a living.

 

It's a bit tricky that one. You want the emphasis, but you can easily go down ellipsis road. When used in conversation, the bitchiest punctuation known to man.

In regards to your original reply, I wasn't sure if you were agreeing with me or not. I wasn't irritated, just confused.

ETA: I prefer to let the not get overlooked, so that I can then come back and repeat my phrase with the not bold and italicized. It's much more satisfying that way, though that doesn't apply to your nonfiction writing, obviously.

 

I wish the category "Love Story" would be added to actual genre categories—putting it in the same plane as Romance, Thriller, Western, Mystery, etc. Maybe it is already an identifiable genre, but I'm not aware of it.

Love stories differ from Romance, although both deal with lovers and what happens to them. But when you pick up a book labeled "Romance," you know, ultimately, the lovers who are identified fairly strongly right at the start are going to end up getting together (either happily ever after, or happily for now.) This is a must for that genre. The enjoyment comes from the journey, but the reader already knows the destination when they first pick up the book.

What we need is another category. If a story is a "Love Story," that means love and its resolution will be the main focus of the story, but—and here's the big difference—the reader will NOT know ahead of time how it's going to turn out. It might end with lovers getting together and living happily ever after, or happily for now. However, the reader won't be sure about this till the end. It also might end with the lovers being separated, or choosing to go their separate ways. Or discovering something that destroys the love they had. Or any other permutation of possiblility that love in the real world can take. The thing is, when the reader starts reading a "Love Story," they won't know how it's going to end.

I'm thinking examples like The Bridges of Madison County. Okay, because of the framing device, the reader knows from the beginning that the lovers won't remain together in this world, but the story could easily also have been told straightforwardly, without the framing device. If it had begun with Francesca's family leaving for the State Fair, followed immediately by Robert Kincaid arriving at Francesca's door, we would not have known where the story was going to lead—but the story still would have worked beautifully. This is definitely a Love Story, but it's not a Romance. Is there a genre category for this kind of story? Not really.

If we're going to insist that genres define how we write, and that we have to fit our stories into specific genres in order to get our feet in the door with publishers, then we need to add more genres, don't we? Otherwise stories like The Bridges Of Madison County can be difficult to market. (And it was, by the way. Reading about how that story finally got to print is an interesting experience. It was fairly groundbreaking in its day.)