WORST Modern Fantasy Trends!

hello hi hi um today we're going to talk about what i don't like about modern fantasy i didn't even know if you could hear me when i was talking over there because the mike's here but today we're going to be talking about some of my least favorite trends of modern fantasy now i've gone on record that i think modern fantasy is by far the most interesting position the genre has ever been in as a direct result of the self-publishing boom it's not some vague idea no since the self-publishing boom we have seen drastic changes of what can find success and be a viable option for the fantasy genre before the big five which if you haven't heard of those look up publishing big five kind of just gate kept everything that we had the possibility of reading if you wanted to find something that was commercially available to you it pretty much had to come through them 99 of the time the internet came about and we now have an entirely different form of what is available to us as fantasy readers there's been great changes as a result of this overall i enjoy it more the different cultures angles stories it's on a whole other ballpark the idea that fantasy is just tolkien clones is dead and done away with that is now the older state and now we're seeing angles and options and cultures and ways that just would have never been published before i'm aware a few of the ones i just showed were traditionally published but i believe the reason they were published under traditional houses or with decent campaigns behind them is because self-publishing proved to these larger guys they could take these series which would be considered more unorthodox for traditional fantasy as it was understood up until recent times just to clarify there i wasn't saying these people couldn't be traditionally published what i know several of them were it's more about the influence and proven commercial ability that self-publishing has brought about yet some of the changes haven't necessarily been for the better subjectively you're welcome to disagree with me here on everything but i think one of the most direct results of the self-publishing boom is going to be my first point i'm going to hit on here today and that is the lowered bar for pros now an author's writing style is you know very much to their own and you as the reader can absolutely just not care or have different standards or tastes so there's no one answer to the question of what is the best or proper way to write fantasy as an author but it's kind of indisputable at this point that we are not getting the same level of writing we used to and now that it's even been proven you can have a mega commercial success without this super sophisticated prose style even the fantasy coming from the traditional big five or their smaller publishing houses doesn't seem to bother with this prose bar that used to exist and instead sometimes it can border on fanfic writing many authors are just kind of in the middle ground right they're just yeah it's not outstanding but it's not bad and i'm fine with that but there's also some that seem to dip a little bit low and i'm not the most snobby person when it comes to an author's writing style i can get over some you know clunky sentences or run-ons it's not the biggest deal it's just when it sinks so low that it starts to bother me a bit it's why when i put on my top 10 lists you'll see series in there that are not exactly sophisticated from the writing standpoint i can forgive it but when i do come across a modern fantasy series that uses the best of what's current and fashionable for the genre and then on top of that layers in some beautiful poetic writing oh the benefits are all the higher it's just like i would love a best of both worlds i would enjoy if authors did kind of scrub through and just you know touch it up tighten it up not you don't have to reach that super high sophisticated flowery style not asking for that but just some smoother structure would be greatly appreciated because that's one of the big things when it comes to an author's writing style right many people think if you're trying to say it needs to be better you're advocating for like tolkien-esque or you know pushing for that kind of older flower you're writing that's not what i'm saying here just smoother more sophisticated in some sense or even you know often beauty can be reached in simplicity so just trying to cut down on fat and making sure you don't use the same word to describe something 10 times in a row would be greatly appreciated i have seen successful modern fantasy series where you'll just see like repetition in that sense on that level and it's like come on please and i get people angry at me every time i bring this up it's especially bad for ya fantasy from what i've seen now there are why a series i've read that definitely do not fall into this criticism that are still written beautifully but there are others that are just they're going in the lowest aspect of what i should expect for an author who's being published for the standard of how they're writing and it bugs me because when i don't like often notice it if we're just kind of sitting in the average but when i do notice it is when i come across a book that's written extremely well then everything else kind of i'm just like oh yeah that was very mundane compared to what could have been but i'm also one of these people who's turned off by overly flowery writing so it's all subjective is what it is but moving on into the next point here this is much more of just a touchstone of fantasy that seems to be being downplayed as time goes on and it's making me sad although we do still see some fantasy series doing this the creation of original races and cultures of them and deep lores and mythologies is kind of going to the wayside and that's disappointing granted there is a lot of exceptions to this but it used to be like a standard of fantasy that if you're going to write a fantasy epic there's going to be multiple races with cultures mythologies and backstories that are all going to come together to create your new fantastical landscape more and more though we're just seeing that it's humans maybe one original fantasy race or a knockoff of one we've seen before and we're lucky if we get that a lot of modern fantasy is just not delving into like the classic high fantasy races which is okay come up with original ones in your own but even if they do that they're not doing it as much or as richly or not focusing on them culturally in the same way we would see with more traditional fantasy and that's just a bummer because i love that aspect of high fantasy and high fantasy in general is trending downwards and we're seeing more low fantasy or even anti-fantasy become the face of the fantastical genre which is strange but i'm all for and okay with we can go through phases i just i don't know i miss discovering like five new fantasy races in a series and there's just so much to dig through and imagine and speculate on it's just not where authors are focusing i get it i'm willing to say goodbye to this for a while but i hope to see some real epic modern fantasy stories that do still take the time and effort to pull in some classic braces or come up with ones on their own now i know i've just encouraged a bunch of comments for people to say like actually there's i'm not saying no one's doing it i'm just saying it's not nearly as prevalent as it was for the genre i actually just ended up in a comment thread on reddit where i was discussing this very topic and user b5441c i believe your name was pointed out that dragons are actually having like a renaissance right now which he's absolutely right on a few people were agreeing me on the point that like a lot of high fantasy races are just dying away and not seen as much yet dragons are the super sexy big deal that's why we're having dragons in the title of like so much so many dragon titles and now i'm actually gonna say something that's probably the most controversial point of any of the ones i bring up and that's because a lot of people were sick of tolkien clones it's been done to death just remaking lord of the rings in many aspects i mean high fantasy for a long time was just a lot of authors trying to recreate in a year what tolkien spent his lifetime on but there were some i would say very good children of tolkien people who adapted his style or his way of perceiving and writing fantasy and did it extremely well i wish we had all the best of the modern genre utilized to do that and i haven't quite seen that yet there's many people who are coming close stormlight archive and that was generally like the first half of the wheel of time but even those series don't do many of the things that modern fantasy and i'm just talking about fantasy in the last like five years has shown itself to be doing extremely well and that's actually kind of like a crazy thing to say like right it's odd to think about a genre of literature as having a substantial change in the last five to ten years but if you've been reading the genre it unarguably has it's just flipped on its head in the last 10 years with the amount of just foreign influence and people who would have never had success having this gate open for them and that's why i still maintain as a general rule of thumb fantasy now is more interesting and awesome than ever but if someone who has the mind of a fondly for fantasy could try and create a high fantasy world in the style of tolkien it blow my freaking mind man i would love love love love that and there's different modern fantasy series you can point at that definitely still have strong elements of tolkien in them i mean i would even say like things like rage of dragons you can draw clear connections to the inspirations from tolkien but i just mean one of the authors who really leans into it and tries to just bring something about that is an homage to tolkien but with just the best of what the modern has to offer and if you want to know what i think the modern has to offer there will be a sequel video to this video as well in the future and if you would like to see a video where i specifically go through and pull my favorite aspects from various modern authors and frankenstein together like some form of mutant collaboration murphy nepear has challenged me to piecemeal together and create a fantasy idea in that sense for a video so i'll be doing that as well um get ready for me in front of a green screen kind of just saying i want this aspect from that author combined with that aspect from that author to drive a story along this line with these tropes so that'll be something i'm working on as well now i've avoided for this video just pointing it like oh the best of modern fantasy but done poorly because i feel like that's kind of the easy way to handle this like oh there's a lot of morally grey characters in fantasy but i'm tired of seeing them done poorly like yeah obviously if it's done poorly you don't want to see that but one more element i think is going to be hard for me to articulate clearly but i'm hoping people will understand what i'm saying is the focus of the narrative being what is fantastic i just am seeing more and more fantasy stories not having the actual narrative being driven by what is fantastical there's exceptions obviously of course even like the urban genre dresden is often motivated and pushed through his story by what is fantastical but there's just less of it maybe i'm just like filled with nostalgia or something but the idea of like a magic ring driving your story as long as you then have character motivations alongside of it doesn't hurt anything and more and more i'm just not seeing that be the case where we have fantastical elements be a part of the driving thrust of the narrative and instead fantasy being a backdrop again not all the time it's just a higher percentage but i i don't know every time i get into another fantasy story and fantasy as a genre is treated as just a setting instead of part of the story i'm a bit disappointed in a way just a little just a smidge just a tiny tiny bit and uh it's never gonna affect a review in like a significant sense but i i like i love first law it's one of my favorite series period full stop yet there's not really anything fantasy related in the plot right it's just like ah there's a character who's a wizard but his focus even as a character is not his magical ability and my heart just kind of reaches out for like could we get something like his dark materials were like everything that's related to the story itself is being motivated by fantasy it's just more immersive as a fantasy fan specifically not even just like a reader but as someone who loves fantasy it makes me feel like i'm having that itch scratch for me to more uh throw away when this is done i feel like i sound super insane right now and i don't even know if what i'm talking about is real but it's just like a feeling i have in my bones anyway this has just been another ranty rambling video here on the channel where i'm sure there's many people who disagree with a lot of the trends i'm identifying and if that's the case and you know of many fantasy series that go against that are modern what i'm saying comment them down below because i'd love to see and be proven wrong in some of these instances here um but let me know also what are some things in modern fantasy you wish would kind of pull more from the roots and the shoulders of the authors a lot of these others stand on because i'm always curious to hear what people have to say on topics like this they're my favorite points of discussion for the genre let me know in the comments down below and like and subscribe if you have not already hit the patreon if you want to support what i do here have a good one y'all peace and of course i would like to record a special shout out to my latest high tier patreons alberto chamel cubita force and jackie stia steve

Channel: Daniel Greene

Views: 688,547

Rating: 4.9210649 out of 5

Keywords: fantasy genre, daniel greene, fantasy tropes, modern fantasy, fantasy books, cosmere, fantasy genre elements, fantasy genre explained, fantasy

Id: HBwH5mg0diE

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020