FANTASY RACES - Terrible Writing Advice

Want to make a fantasy world? Great! The magic and mystery are at your command while shaping a fantastic world full of exotic wonders. Yet who will live in this marvelous fantasy world? Why, we need to make some fantasy races. But there are so many wonderful fantasy races in numerous stories across many different mediums. How do we stand out from the crowd? By ripping off J.R.R Tolkien of course! Now some of you may think that the genre of fantasy is an excuse to free one's imagination to create truly alien and bizarre races. But that is utterly wrong. Fantasy is all about being derivative and not getting out of your comfort zone. It is very important that the genre of fantasy remain sternly under the shadow of Tolkien and make no attempts to push the boundaries in any way. We do this by copying Tolkien's fantasy races while making sure to completely miss the point of Tolkien's themes. And of course, never should we actually bother to read the original mythologies that inspired Tolkien to create his works. No one uses primary sources who wants to be taken seriously. Just copy and paste. Let's get started! The first race we want to add into our fantasy world is the Elves. Tolkien's elves had a sordid and violent past. However, we have only watched the movies so let's make our elves just like that; ethereal, beautiful, and impossibly smug. If fact, we can apply many of the lessons of making a perfect protagonist to the elves. Make sure they are flawless in every way. I am sure their ageless wisdom will come across as endearing rather than condescending. Be sure they use their heritage as an excuse to lord over the other races. I can't see any historical parallels at all! So now that we have our eternal and perfect elves, what do we do next? Why we add more of them! If readers like one race of smug, pretentious, and lecturing immortals who are always right, then they will love to have a whole bunch more! Want to preach about environmentalism? Use wood elves and make them tree hugging hippies! What to make your elves edgy? Send them trough a goth phase and add Dark Elves! Why stop there? Keep adding new elven races until there isn't any room. Or until we run out of ideas. Speaking of running out of ideas, Dwarves are the easiest fantasy race. Just copy them directly from Tolkien without changing a single trait. We may need to give them a Scottish accent to save time rather than creating a whole distinctive language. Need a source of steampunk technology? Dwarves will be the go to origin of any mechanical devices within the setting, but don't bother to explain why they haven't used their technological edge to conquer all of the other races. Make sure they stay within their underground halls, not having anything to do with the plot. But don't leave them out either. We can't deviate from the theme of ripping off Tolkien. Next we will add in Orcs. Remember to make the Orcs' nature fundamentally evil. Some may find the moral and philosophical implications of a race that is inherently evil to be rather problematic as it brings up deep questions about the nature of evil as well as call into the question the influence of society and culture upon its members. This presents troubling conundrums like would an Orc be evil it he was raised in an environment that taught kindness and mercy while renouncing violence? If evil only destroys, then how can it create a race at all? If Orcs were once elves twisted into darkness, then could it possible for them to find redemption under the right circumstances? How would a society that is utterly evil and dedicated to destruction even function? Tolkien himself struggled with these very questions, which is why we are going to completely ignore them! Now let's look at Halflings! Ditch them! You heard me. Remember what I said earlier about ripping off Tolkien, well here is where we ignore that rule and completely remove Halflings. Halflings are boring and they will have no place in our fantasy plot since our conflict with the dark lord will be resolved in a one on one duel with a teenager who is secretly the heir to the human kingdom. We can't have meek, ordinary folk actually rise to the occasion and selflessly risk their happy lives to save the world. After all, average people can't accomplish anything and the fantasy genre certainly wouldn't waste time pandering to those people, now would it? Why would they need an escapist fantasy? Now we have all the fantasy races we need to populate our very original and creative fantasy world. Some might worry that we stray into unfortunate implications by creating 'races' who have specific 'abilities'. Especially when we say that some races, like say blond hair blue eyed elves, are better than others. But don't worry. No one calls anyone else a racist on the internet.

Channel: Terrible Writing Advice

Views: 1,620,039

Keywords: Terrible Writing Advice, Not to guide, writing, Bad advice, That was a terrible idea, How to, How not to, guide, comedy, sarcasm, Talentless hack, How did you end up here?, Novel, Novel writing, Writing a book, book, J.P. Beaubien, J.P.Beaubien, Parody, Spoof, How desperate are you?, Terrible, JPBeaubien, JP Beaubien, JRR Tolkien, Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, Fantasy, Fantasy Races, Ripping off Tolkien, Mary Sue Elves, Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, Halflings, Orcs, Worldbuilding

Id: XZmUUupSgQk

Length: 4min 17sec (257 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/KerianH]

Give it twenty years and some other YouTuber will make an exact copy of this video...except instead of Tolkien it'll be about George R.R. Martin.

I'd bet on it but it's too safe a bet to bother with.

[u/[deleted]]

And now for halflings.... COMPLETELY IGNORE THEM!

Oh. I've been doing this the whole time.

I suppose Leprechauns fit their place as the shorter-than-dwarves guys in my world though.

[u/scharfes_S]

That's really heavy-handed for satire.

[u/green_speak]

He criticizes novices for not reading the original material and ignoring Tolkien's themes when making elves, but then complains when Tolkien's dwarves are simply lifted unchanged. The video's underlying advice is valid ("dare to be original"), but the video itself rankled me more than it should.

[u/BlooDeck]

A setting with a fascist elven hegemony sounds pretty interesting.

[u/creative_account_me]

I like a lot of this guy's videos, but i never really liked this one. It's a bit more clear when we think about how original you can get, and still fall under the same criticisms.

Lets say you make a small magical race with dark gray skin, call them Yobbirs. Think about how they would survive. Well, they can't fight without the use of magic, so they'd probably hide a lot. Maybe they'd be scavengers, but that would mean they're effectively an insignificant race - they'll definitely not be building towns and fighting the major wars. Scale up their magic a bit, make them a farming community.

Great, now you have a completely unique race - completely disconnected from tolkein and D&D. Except you now have short gray elves. Criticism survives.

Hell - Elves, dwarves, goblins - they were all already in mythology. And orcs are basically goblin-elves (orcs being corrupted elves). Tolkien wouldn't survive the criticism either. Hobbits, his most unique human-like race, aren't used until he has a whole chapter of exposition to explain them. And really, they're just agricultural humans, effectively.

[u/MC_Boom_Finger]

Damn it. I have to redesign my races now.

[u/7Demented]

I love this dude's series, such simple comedy about awful writing. I really recommend watching all the videos he has out because they're quite good at subtly pointing you in the right direction.

[u/Ryzanix]

i can't put into words how much I loved this...and how scared I am now that my world may follow some tropes. EXCEPT THE ORC THING eff you my orc's are noble in my world sucka's! :3

plz don't hate me...