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#fantasy tropes
headspace-hotel · 1 year
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There is a type of plot that is prevalent in YA books and starting to get into general lit that I do not like. It is a similar trope to the MacGuffin, but instead of the plot being driven by an object, it is driven by the characters being in some sort of situation with formally fixed stakes.
Just as a MacGuffin is an object with no specific properties that affect its importance to the story, the identifying characteristic of this plot is that exact nature of the situation is irrelevant or at least not very important.
A very common example is when characters are involved in some sort of game or competition—for example, the first Throne of Glass book involves the protagonist competing to become the king's assassin, but the plot of the book would need to change very little if the competition was a beauty pageant.
"Gamified" plot lines like this often also include MacGuffins (to drive the "game"), confirming the tropes' similarity in my head.
The other common example is the "magic/superhero/assassin school" plot. The "school" is often just a device that brings the characters together and keeps them on a predetermined track, but there's nothing about what the characters are learning or even the school's specific identity as an educational institution that affects the plot.
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insomniac-arrest · 6 months
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Entire plot line to an adult fantasy novel in the search bar
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electricalpylon · 1 month
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plotandelegy · 9 months
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Crafting Future From Ruins: A Writer's Guide to Designing Post-Apocalyptic Technology
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Photo: Standard License- Adobe Stock
Crafting post-apocalyptic tech involves blending creativity and realism. This is a guide to help you invent tech for your post-apocalyptic world:
Tinker, Tailor, Writer, Spy: Start with modern tech. Take it apart (conceptually or literally if you're feeling adventurous). Using the basics, think of how your character might put it back together with limited tools and resources.
Master the Fundamentals: Understand the basic principles underlying the tech you're working with. Physics, chemistry, and biology can be your best friends. This understanding can guide your character's resourceful innovations.
Embrace the Scrapyard: The world around you has potential tech components. Appliances, vehicles, infrastructure - how could these be deconstructed and repurposed? Your characters will need to use what's at hand.
Cherishing Old Wisdom: Pre-apocalypse books and manuals are the new internet. A character with access to this knowledge could become a vital asset in tech-building.
Indigo Everly
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fuzzy-oooze · 4 months
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steampunk, as a artsyle, is weird because it's very popular and well-known and common but it typically only really shows up in the form of homages and one-offs rather than actually dedicating to it. and whenever it DOES show up as a main aesthetic in something, it's always like the entire identity of the thing, their tends to be very little originality in steampunk media. when it comes to steampunk media that's actually worth talking about it's like... bioshock, dishonored, maybe fallen london? a very small number of things. it's like the DnD of aesthetics.
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thepedanticbohemian · 7 months
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Break these terrible amateur tropes by thinking outside the box.
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ground-zoro · 6 months
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The "coming back wrong" trope is good and all, but I think it'd be better if they only appear to be wrong from an outside perspective.
Like imagine if when you die and before you go wherever you go next, you get shown the statistics etc for you life. You're shown the truth of your life. Truths you yourself might not have know or realized while alive, and truths you could never have know.
Imagine bringing some of those truths about yourself and your life back with you when you return.
People coming back as different genders and sexualities because they learned things about themselves in death they never got to in life. Or being more comfortable and confident in the same because they've been cosmically confirmed.
People having their behavior changed because they learned how often they were cruel or too kind. Learned how many hours they spent at work instead of with family and friends.
Imagine coming back to life and getting to live your life better, truer.
Imagine coming back and your soul being more at peace with itself and knowing what to do to be happier.
How could could any of that be "wrong"? But how could you ever be the same?
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Human with diabetes X Vampire partner who can smell their blood glucose levels
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druidx · 2 months
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Saying fantasy grace as a spell to purify food & drink, and stop people becoming unwell or assassinated.
The royal family sits down to dinner. The archbishop says grace to ensure any poisons have been nullified.
The healer of a party of adventurers saying grace as the pottage is being stirred or the roast spitted so no one succumbs to dysentery.
A mother making sure all her children know how and when to say grace as she sends them off to their new homes, in the hope their family line continues.
People of different religions arguing over the wording, not realising that it doesn't matter - it's the faith and intent which makes the magic work.
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homoqueerjewhobbit · 7 months
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Actually, the best part of being a "chosen one" is you don't have to send in a resume and write a coverletter. A magical scroll or mysterious stranger or flock of ravens just show up and give it to you.
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mask131 · 9 months
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The thing that I always found abominably fascinating and insanely mind-blowing with the Earthsea series is that it breaks all the worn-out, over-used, “seen everywhere” cliches of fantasy people complain about today and try to avoid. 
Tired of your typical Europe-setting? Here is a world of islands influenced by a lot of various non-European civilizations!
Tired of having a white-predominant cast? Here is a series where people of color are the dominant ethnicities and the white are the minority and bizarre barbarian foreigners from far away!
Tired of having the heroes go on grand and perilous monster-slaying quest to fight some dark overlord or fetch a magical item? Here are books where the villains are elusive, abstract and philosophical threats, where the quests to defeat them are very down-to-earth, solitary and rely more on self-search and the understanding of human nature rather than great exploits. 
Tired of seeing the same old-worn out fantasy races tropes? None of this here! 
This book series was created with the intention of subverting, avoiding or breaking the new tropes and stereotypes that were rising up with the success of Tolkien’s work. It was made to be different and ground-breaking and stereotype-crushing, and it worked extremely well, becoming a classic of fantasy literature and influencing the genre massively... And yet, people only rediscover it today, and know about it today somehow. (Well a “large” today including the dozen of last years of so).
This series is the perfect example of the “new” fantasy that rises up in the modern era, as an attempt to “break off” from the “traditional” or “cliche” fantasy... And the first book has been sitting there since the END OF THE 60s!!! 
There are more examples I could point out of books that present to us a completely out-there, trope reinventing, stereotype breaking form of fantasy - and that yet have been there since the 70s or the 80s, or even before! As I went back in time to see several of the “classics” of fantasy literature, I came to understand something - a lot of the “cliches” and “stereotypes” and “over-used tropes” of fantasy people complain about today were not at all dominant for a very long time. If you believe the words of many people out there, you imagine fantasy never had black characters or queer characters or non-European settings or non-Tolkienesque plotlines until the 2010s or something... Which is not true. Fantasy was such a varied, bizarre, diverse genre in its literary form all throughout the 20th century, and many “old” works of the first generations of the post-Tolkien fantasy are basically what people want to see today as “pattern-breaking and fresh new fantasy”. 
The Tolkienesque-fantasy and all of its cliches and stereotypes were not so much dominant as just present in a handful of massively popular and widespread works - the case of the Shannara series can be pointed out, as its first book was PRAISED at the time for being able to recreate a Tolkien story in the 70s, and it was because it was mostly a copy of the Lord of the Rings that it got so popular (and why it is not well-liked today). And then the 80s rolled and early D&D reignited the flame of the Tolkien-inspired fantasy. By the 90s, it seemed Tolkien had been used and over-used to death, and people didn’t trust it all anymore... Which is why David Eddings’ Belgariad series was created. Its key point was to take back all the elements of the traditional epic fantasy story, but reassemble them, freshen them up, twist them slightly, all of that to re-create a by-the-book BUT fresh, new and interesting series. It was an attempt at prooving that, with innovation and some twists and modernization, the Tolkienesque fantasy would not die - and it worked massively well. And then in the 2000s, the Lord of the Rings movie sealed the deal. 
All these works make it look like fantasy had always been copying or taking inspiration from Tolkien. But it is false. It is true that most of the classics are tied to Tolkien, but not always in imitation or re-creation - in the case of “Earthsea”, there was a willing attempt at getting away and inverting the Tolkienesque fantasy to create a fantasy that went the very opposite direction. Same thing with the Elric Saga, also designed to be the reverse or opposite of The Lord of the Rings, and which in turn became the classic of another new genre of fantasy: dark fantasy. And Conan in all that? People forget that the Conan the Barbarian series were just as influential for fantasy works as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was. The Elric Saga, again, was created to completely reverse and avoid the Conan-like fantasy. A similar thing was done with Leiber for his “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” series, which was designed to break away from the Conan “heroic fantasy” style and reinvent the genre in a new direction. 
There are so many “old” and “classic” works of literary fantasy that actually do not feel like a “classic” at all because they have all the vibes, elements and expectations one has from a non-classic, non-traditional fantasy... BUT THEY ARE THE FOUNDATIONS, they are the basis and classics and inspirations of fantasy. And it all shows this huge gap between what people think fantasy is, and what fantasy really was - it is a fascinating case study of how one specific trend somehow got over the entire genre. Imagine a world where people think Gothic novels can only have a vampire or the ghost of a judge, and must be Bram Stokers-inspired, and that everybody points out they are tired to see Dracula-expies everywhere... Only to discover the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and be baffled by them and their “inventivity” and “breaking of patterns”. I’m sorry, that’s the fastest comparison I can make, but this feels just like that. There is this strangely specific idea of what fantasy is today forged on a few items... I think, beyond the massive success of Tolkien and imitators, D&D probably is also to “blame” for how people see fantasy today.
But even then, D&D took inspiration from so many non-conventional works of fantasy... Yes many became “classics” now, though often ignored by the masses - The Elric Saga, and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were big influences. But take the Jack Vance series “The Dying Earth”, another big inspiration on early D&D. Take that. This series is from the 50s - FROM THE 50S - and yet it is a unique genre of sci-fi fantasy that I haven’t seen much being done around, and it creates such a weird, whimsical, bizarre, surrealistic fantasy world, it feels completely unique. And again, it is a classic of the 50s and 60s. 
I don’t really know where I try to go with this but the important thing is: when someone wants to read “non-traditional” or “non-Tolkienesque” fantasy, or “non-stereotyped” fantasy, it is possible, instead of searching for every new author nowadays (not a bad thing to do that though), it is possible to just go back in time, look back at the books of the 70s, 60s and 50s, and find there a novelty, a freshness and an inventivity that is lacking in a mass production of modern day fantasy. And that such a thing is possible is truly crazy for me. I don’t know if such a thing happened with other literary genres, but it is insane that sometimes in fantasy, to see “new” things you just have to look back into the past. 
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When taking in the common fantasy trope of "gods need prayer badly to increase their power" combined with the fantasy trope of "gods as people" the concept of prayer being central to a god's power is really fascinating. In settings where gods need prayer, the type of prayer is often a petitionary prayer, asking for something from a god. It's purely transactional.
But what must it be like, if a god is a person? If a god is a person, a god can get lonely. A god can desire companionship. A god might want to be remembered for something other than what they can give. A god has to see all the prayers and deny some because they contradict, or because it would cause greater harm. Yes, stopping the rain would make your day easier, but it would make you hungrier. Yes, you don't want this much traffic, but if everyone wants less traffic and drives at the same time, it creates the same problem. So they do the best they can for as many worshippers as they can, and are rewarded by snubbing, being called fickle, and even louder demands.
To a god like that, they give their worshippers everything they can, and the only thing they get in return is demands for even more. And to add insult to injury, some humans act as though even the act of praying is an offense, as though even the small energy expended by asking is too much to ask and the gods should just give them freely. Is it any wonder, that they go mad?
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littleevil0ne1 · 8 months
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Phoenix
"Sorry, Was that suppose to kill me?"
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Drew this last year for the Drawlloween prompt Undead. I was aiming for that fantasy trope where they try to kill someone in a way where they should DEFINITELY BE DEAD but WHOOPS turns out THEY'RE IMMORTAL OH SHIT and Now they're glaring at you and you should probably run
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marietheran · 2 months
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ok - but imo, dramatic place-names in fantasy books aren't that unrealistic. we named a desert "death valley" after all. if there were car-sized (and larger) spiders living there, we might have actually called it "the valley of dreadful death". (see: nan durgotheb in the silmarillion)
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fights4users · 4 months
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Thinking about Tron and how it is a fantasy disguised as a Sci fi. There’s been essays on this before and I think they capture it better than I could put it, but if you really think about it the movie is sold as a Technological fantasy. Imagining this fantastic digital world in the computer, a newer technology now in peoples homes used more than ever. (Seriously look back at old marketing materials and magazines even the novelization and storybook and how they talk about the film.
It’s made me think about how Tron follows one of the staple Fantasy tropes of a “Rightful king”. The throne has fallen to some great evil, a tyrant, and those who should rule are displaced or not there yet. It’s the “everything is utopian once we have the right guy on the throne”. It’s true here!
Once the MCP is defeated the users are restored to their place of “rule” within the system. (It’s more complicated than that but stay with me) and in the real world Flynn has taken his rightful place moving up in the company as he should have originally before his games were stolen. He’s one of the heads of the company post time skip (everyone likes to ignore it’s a time slip and say it was instant. We don’t know how long). The rightful king.
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fuzzy-oooze · 5 months
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mad scientists are always biologists, geneticists, or engineers which is stupid and bad, we need more diversity for mad scientists, I'll even list some disciplines you can use here:
-taxonomy -cartography -meteorology -linguistics -hematology -algedonics -bryology
I'm sure you can think of more but these are just to get your brain thinkin'
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