WHY SO MANY BOOKS FEEL THE SAME 🤔

Hello friends for today's video I wanted to go through a list of elements that I have noticed in a lot of books that I have picked up recently over the course of the last year couple of years that contribute to feeling like I am reading the same book over and over again I'm obviously not referring to literally every single book I pick up it's just that there are certain books I pick up where it feels so much like a carbon copy of something that I've already read and I wanted to dissect what the elements that are leading to this because of course a lot of genres not just within fantasy but so many they have obvious Inspirations and they go through Trends and they go through cycles of tropes that get thrown in it feels like to everything that comes out and it sometimes feels like it's inescapable for example we all know that we've gone through Dragon phases vampire crazes and other sorts of things fantasy itself especially adult fantasy has definitely had this happen as well in the past I would say and I don't think this is profound by any means I think a lot of us would say this that it was for a while stuck in feeling like it was too heavily relying on its Lord of the Rings inspiration and as a result a lot of classic fantasy if you go back and read from certain eras might feel similar to each other or might feel like it's l of the Rings and it kind of took a while for it to Branch out into other things and of course it's still going through its Cycles but I wanted to specifically today tap into why it feels as though fantasy romance or just romance is in fantasy are all starting to sound the same I know we've had conversations before about female characters in fantasy male characters in fantasy and just in books in general and the kinds of tropes that we see over and over again what we'd like to see more of and I'll have those videos linked if you'd like to watch but then we've also discussed things that irk Us in fantasy romance and also same thing things we would like to see more of and while those range from being big topics that a lot of us tend to agree upon to very specific minor things that for whatever reason maybe irk you individually what I wanted to do today that's a little bit different is essentially create a reference point for myself but then also maybe for you if you're a reviewer or not that I want anybody to use my videos as writing advice but if you yourself are a writer maybe you can ask like am I falling into this a little bit I wanted to go through 15 different elements that on their own I don't necessarily think are bad to include I don't think there's anything wrong with and I've said this many times having something that is on Trend if you are doing something unique and interesting with it if you have compelling characters if you have a really amazing creative world there's so much you can do with a story that's still may be rooted in something familiar that's not inherently bad but it's when you have an abundance of these things that's when things start to feel repetitive for some people this isn't necessarily a bad thing maybe you are looking for stuff that just fits Within These bullet points you're like Yep this is what I like so if you say that it fits within this that's for me but jumping into it and the very first thing would be Fay every single time it feels like I do an anticipated releases video and I do these monthly to keep you up to date on new releases and it's a nice thing for myself to keep track pretty much every time there's at least one book that has Fay in it and and Fay come in all shapes and sizes we'll say in various different fantasy Works in some they're extremely malicious and they're more associated with folklore they're more tied to the environment and the weather and the seasons and then you have some where they're just hot people that live for a long time and have pointy ears but that is the very obvious first point the next one would be modern or colloquial language I think a lot of us I don't know what it is but in our fantasy stories we don't like when the characters talk like we talk we want characters to feel like a reflection of real human beings we just don't want them to talk like us we say like all the time we Meander we say you know at the ends of sentences for what reason I'm unsure maybe we all just kind of secretly need some validation to the points we're making but regardless we don't actually speak in a way that we want directly replicated in our works however I don't necessarily mean the opposite needs to happen where everybody speaks in a really formal way that feels stunted we don't need that we just seem to like something that's in the middle I think this is different if you have some kind of urban fantasy world that makes sense that maybe they would speak a little bit more modern but there is something odd that I can't quite determine why it's so prevalent in fantasy romance I don't know if it's because maybe some fantasy romance readers are coming from romance and that tends to be rooted in contemporary settings or our own world and those people do tend in those books to talk more like how we talk and thus if you have readers going from that into fantasy Romance the dialogue would still be similar I don't quite know where this is coming from but regardless it just feels odd it feels clashing to have worlds that don't feel particularly modern necessarily yet we have the characters speaking the way we speak point three moronically snarky main characters what is going on I don't mind the tough and Gruff character I don't mind the character with a chip on their shoulder and I also recognize that a lot of books want to tap into female rage that idea but I also I I can't handle the characters that are a chip on their shoulder and also really stupid because if somebody is offering to help you as an example if there's a scene where you clearly cannot do something on your own and you need assistance and another character comes into the picture and they're like here let me help you and they're like get away from me unless you want to die you're in no position to do that why are you so dumb stop it so it's that it's that weird I just want to kill everybody and slit everybody's throat and I have some snarky comeback to every single thing that's said to me and I'm feisty aren't I feisty and isn't that kind of actually hot though and you're like no it's not it's really not I don't understand because snarky character can be fun they can be really fun characters to have or the character that always has a quip those can be fun characters to write but when you combine them with idiocy that's when it doesn't work it doesn't like I need those characters to ask themselves does it make any sense for me to act like this right now or to at least once question their behavior like why am I so pissed off at the world all the time ask ask that question and that will instantly endear me to that character being like Oh well at least they're looking Inward and and asking why but when they don't and then everybody else seems to embolden that behavior and act like it's like well isn't that just how they are you're like no please stop it point four enemies to lovers this is not also anything new I again I really want to emphasize what I said at the beginning none of these in isolation are bad and a lot of these in combination are not bad it's when it's almost all of these which certain books you can probably go through this checklist and be like yes yes yeah that too yep it's got that too a true enemies to lovers story story can be extremely difficult to pull off but when it is done well it really Taps into breaking down what separates us and then seeing the person on the other side it doesn't even have to just be romantic it can often times be with friendships or just people seeing each other differently and I think so many of us gravitate towards that idea not necessarily was execution but the idea because our own world we have so many stupid metaphorical walls between us and they're useless and we have so much more in common with each other if we could just take those walls down and so seeing that reflected in fiction can be really powerful however most of the time it's like somebody was mildly annoying on a first encounter and then suddenly we hate them for eternity until we also recognize that for whatever reason we find them so hot it's probably because that perfectly chiseled jawline and really sharp cheekbones and they're massive and it's like H anyway so that'll be my next point but the idea that these characters are enemies when in actuality it's just we don't know how to write tension without writing them supposedly hating each other it's getting old and it would be it would be so good if we actually did it really I would love to know I did a video where I took a lot of the things that you're frustrated with and I talked about books that do those things in a way that I actually think a lot of us would like but if you have your own recommendations for any of these points really feel free to leave those in the comments because that way people who are like yeah I don't dislike that individual point I just want to see it in a book in a way that's a little different they'll have your recommendations getting into the next point though so there's a few that are similar we have all lust no love pretty self-explanatory I don't think I need to elaborate too much on this but it is a little bit irksome for me to pick up a book that is supposed to have an amazing fantasy world and a really beautiful love story and all that happens is that the characters find each other hot and if I wanted to watch good-looking people find each other good-look I would watch too hot to handle you know I don't want that in a book where I'm supposed to watch these characters fall in love you know what they love they love having sex with each other that's it that's all it comes down to and I'm like that's not the same thing it's not the same thing and I will say it was really funny because the book that kind of sparked this I read it around the same time as a book that is not Fant romance in fact it's pretty much just fantasy but there is a tiny like the tiniest of tiny romantic subplots and it is so cute it's so cute and I'll talk about that book in a future video but oh my gosh like I I was so in love with the way in which these characters like the one character when they realize that they're falling for the other character the actions that they take to show that they care is precious and it had nothing to do with what the characters looked like nothing wrong with characters finding each other attractive and also I don't even care if characters initially are drawn to each other because of their looks that is a thing that can happen but it's when you have these characters confessing their undying love for each other when they've never had anything about one another articulated that they actually like either in the narrative or spoken aloud in dialogue it it it doesn't make any sense next up we have what I call doormats this is just when love interests have no personality they have no backbone they are just there for the main character to walk all over and yet still be uplifted when the love interest is basically a yes man that's not a good love interest and this goes the other direction too uh we do have times where the female character is just she just exists to be a curvy shape for the guy to be into and she supports him no matter what even though there's nothing between them it goes in all different ways you know so doormats please stop and then another extreme of this is the abusive love interest where I'm like I don't get it we either want somebody that bends to our will completely and entirely or we want somebody who doesn't allow us to be a human being with our own thoughts and opinions speaks her mind nah so those are the extremes and obviously it's rare that you're going to find a book with both of these in it can we have characters that are their own people something in the middle healthy relationships nice relationships or complicated ones but the characters grow together something something with a little more nuance and that's a little more Dynamic okay this next one is kind of specific but I unfortunately see it all the time and that's the way in which the characters constantly refer to each other as males or females I understand that in the instance of Fay the characters are more like tapping into this animall like element to themselves or whatever and thus referring to each other as males and females is reflecting that but it's getting old I don't like when real humans talk about like oh that female over there or something or like well you know how females are and you're like what no gross and the same for men you know if women or other guys I guess are just talking about like oh well you know how males are it's it's weird we're not we're human beings you know ladies fellas guys gals whatever right I don't understand why there's this hyperfixation on calling each other males and females unless it makes sense to the World building which oftentimes it doesn't it's just uh this next point I'm going to make it's just because Sarah J masted it and the next point is is it an overt Sarah J J Mass inspiration and if so it's probably not going to feel particularly original and it might Encompass a lot of the other things I've mentioned anyway but there's more to the overt Sarah J Mass inspiration than just Fay or males females and all those sorts of things there are some books where the characters arcs and their personalities and even the world to some degree is just the same thing like you end up predicting what's going to happen if you know anything about Sarah J Massa books because that's all that's happening in this book over here it's just you slightly changed the setting or you slightly changed the main character's hair color or you gave the love interest a beard instead of making him clean shaven it's okay to have Sarah J Mass inspiration is totally fine a lot of authors are inspired by other authors that's uh always going to be a thing forever and always there's nothing that is so unique that we've never seen anything like it before and every anything that even borders on that often a scene is too weird but it has to have a little bit more original ity it's okay to be inspired by her I understand that in a lot of ways people look to her as sort of like the mother of fantasy romance but we can do different things than just what she does next up tall men and Tiny women that can be cute it can be cute it can also be cute when guys are not 6' five at the minimum and it can also be nice when women aren't like 5 feet tall at the maximum you know we can we can have Heights in between these things and we can also have characters that it's not like the love interest always has to be so different in height from the main character people have different heights and again tall and short can be adorable it can happen and there's nothing wrong with it being in a book but when it's this combined with everything else or a lot of these other things it's contributing to it feeling like the same old same old ethnically ambiguous man and I also put in parentheses tan can we stop calling the love interests tan and then retroactively being like no he's a man of color so if he's tan it's probably because he was outside a lot which ironically some of these characters are tan and then they never seem to spend time Outdoors but regardless the ethnically ambiguous male characters there's a reason that every love interest it feels like in stories these days if you look up fan art for one that's fan art for all of them people have different skin tones and they can exist within stories and they can be the love interest too and hey they can be the main characters also and I think the reason that tan is so frustrating is because when authors try to retroactively say that a character is is supposed to be a person of color then write them in the language that would indicate that they're a person of color and not just a white person who was sun-kissed just the perfect amount next up we have the alpha male this is very similar to the the males females rhetoric but what's funny is the alpha males in books are not the same thing as what we categorize as alpha males in real life pretty much at all alpha males are closer in these books to being the doormat character who just happens to sometimes growl at the woman when they're filled with passion and really want to do them and then suddenly it's like oh now he's an alpha like he's an alpha in the bedroom but the rest of the time he's like uber supportive and like yeah do whatever fits your fancy walk all over me if you need to but in the bedroom I rule that room you know like that's the vibe and um in real life it's like women are second to the man they provide for us and we must obey them because they are our masters I don't think that there's anything wrong with having characters that are very different in personalities or who want certain things so long as everybody is on board with that within that relationship that's fine but it's just that there's so many different kinds of human beings that display different characteristics we can just have more of a reflection of that in our characters I think that would go such a long way a minute ago I was talking about how tall men and Tiny women are a thing and this next point is massive men which I'm not referring to their heights and that's all I'll say these next two are not necessarily the same things but they often result in very similar arcs or plots and that would be Amnesia and or hidden identity so sometimes they're tied together in that the Amnesia results in a hidden identity from the character themselves or the character has a hidden identity and they know it but it's a reveal later on in the story this is something that is just really frequent in a lot of these and I think this results in not just for how the arc plays out for the character but with the love interest it kind of has this we don't have to work as hard for the characters to fall in love with each other because oh wow I got my memories back and it turns out I used to really love you so now I'm in love with you like that and then you don't actually have to work to develop the love between the characters for the last one this is less so rooted in the characters themselves or these specific more romance oriented tropes but just this also contributes to things feeling really similar if not almost borderline identical and that would be the very underdeveloped worlds so many fantasy readers truly are very open to reading fantasy romance and we're not even necessarily expecting the most epic of fantasy worlds cuz there's a lot of fantasy that's not considered fantasy romance it's just considered fantasy and it's not like there's that much World building involved sometimes there are books where there's no magic there's not even really different races of beings or anything that you could point to and it's very obvious it's fantasy it's just that it's a political structure that's different from ours and countries with a different history so it's not like we're looking for the most epic and huge of proportions kind of Fantasy World building it's just that we want the World building to not be underd veloped we want it to serve a purpose and we want it to make sense and it can be really cozy it doesn't have to be anything spectacular I think a book that really stands out to me and this is more so like cozy fantasy cozy fantasy romance would be and a lot of you know I really like it and if you don't like it that's totally fine but the very secret society of irregular witches it's pretty much just it's our own world but there are witches that exist that's it it didn't need to have a whole lot else going on that's all it really needed to serve the plot which is that because witches keep their identities hidden there are these three young orphan girls who happen to be witches and the people that are her caretakers are their caretakers the individuals know that those three young girls are witches they themselves though don't know anything about magic so they're trying to find somebody who can teach these girls so that they don't accidentally reveal themselves one day and then put themselves in danger and that's it that's all you needed to know and that worked for that book there are instances though where we have have these worlds that it feels as though very little is being put in because we're just allowing the reader to fill in the gaps based off of whatever other fantasy worlds we've read about and then it's not like it's actually anything unique in in the context of that story and that's unfortunate because there are instances where the worlds do seem really cool but because we're not developing them very much then there's not a whole lot for for readers to latch on to and thus it makes readers question why is this even fantasy you could have written this story with contemporary and it probably would have worked a lot better but anyway that is it for a kind of concise is list of things that I have noted you could categorize a lot of these as tropes or just things that occur language that is used within books that is making it feel as though a lot of the books we're picking up feel very similar to each other and I hope that similar to what I said at the beginning the way that fantasy kind of had to learn how to Branch out of The Lord of the Rings inspiration and a lot of the tropes that came with that I hope that we can start to see a lot of works that come out of these specific things as well if you have your own recommendations for things that you think really utilize these tropes as best as possible feel free to leave those recommendations but anyway thanks so much for watching I hope you have a great rest of your day and I'll see you later bye [Music]

Channel: Elliot Brooks

Views: 44,986

Keywords: elliot brooks, elliot, brooks, booktube, booktuber, fantasy, fantasy books, adult fantasy

Id: lvGXSWKnNM4

Length: 22min 23sec (1343 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 06 2024