>>25489672
It's bad

Even fantasy literature needs to draw from reality. The best fantasy and sci-fi novels are able to use real life history to inform the setting. If I'd had to hazard a guess, the decline in quality is proportional to the historical education of the author.

>>25489672
The biggest problem is that genre fiction sucks dicks.

>>25489820
Not really, just most of it. Most recently published litfic isn't that great either. Rooney is dogshit.

>>25489814
Yes, and the dearth of autistic combat veteran authors (too white and male).

Not enough harems

>>25489672
women with low body fat would never have tits that big.

George not writing the fucking sequels

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>>25489672
World Building. No not that it's bad or lacking. If anything people are putting in too much focus on world building. Or magic systems. And it comes at the expense of the story. Everyone wants their fantasy to be some encyclopedia or travelogue that goes in depth into its world. But there's no story. Tolkien had a massive world plotted out and invented before he wrote his books but he put the story first. There's a lot about Middle Earth you don't even get outside the appendices or Sillmarillion which were mostly added later by his son going off of posthumous notes. It's still story first. World building is easy. World building is the fun part for the writer. Tell your fucking story. No your 900 page first volume of 10 is not rich in lore and history. It's pointless.

>>25489672
I don't read them because I'm a big boy who reads big boy books but if it's anything like every other modern fantasy slop then D&D and Lotr. It's all the same soulless unoriginal slop. It's medieval fantasy that's not even medieval.

>>25489672
People don't understand reality so they have nothing to bind their story, and they have no understanding of morality so there's nothing to aspire to. Modern fantasy just exists for wish fulfillment and nothing else.

>>25489854
Lets have your top five books then
Could use a good laugh

>>25489866
Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
Story of the Stone
The Divine Comedy
The Faerie Queene
Dangerous Liaisons

Now give the class yours smarty-pants

>>25489672
Businessification.
You need to get insanely lucky to get your fantasy novel published, or be very voracious at marketing yourself in booktok and other social media to succeed.

People are still writing great books, most likely more often than ever before. We will just never get interested enough to read them, because there is so much to choose from.
Tolkien is bit of an outlier, because you simply couldn’t get away with what he did anymore. Nobody is ever going to know your deep and complex lore, because you’re not tolkien. Publishers will want you to dump it straight on the page for dumber readers, because nobody is going to discuss your setting and the delicately hidden bits of lore on 3rd party websites like they do for Tolkien and Rowling.

I’ve literally have a normie friend (who doesn’t even read, just listens to audiobooks and watches marvel movies) tell me: ”Why would I ever read any other fantsasy author, when tolkien is the goat?”.
Being some kind of ”lotr autist” is a normie badge of honor today.

Also I don’t know if this is a real thing or not, but I’ve noticed readers are weirdly hyper specific about things they want from a story. I don’t know if this is some manga influence or what? But fantasy readers are literally searching with specific tags. And if there is this one trope they ”hate” like say ”enemies to lovers”, they will categorize the whole book around that one ”tag”.
It is just weird.
Like people aren’t looking for something new or even good. They’re satisfied with something repetive and mediocre as long as it fills their tag requirements.

>>25489672
I know this is going to come off as a meme answer, but unironically to write well in fantasy and sci-fi you need a high IQ.

>>25489899
It's honestly a pretty depressing state of affairs

>>25489899
>Also I don’t know if this is a real thing or not, but I’ve noticed readers are weirdly hyper specific about things they want from a story. I don’t know if this is some manga influence or what? But fantasy readers are literally searching with specific tags. And if there is this one trope they ”hate” like say ”enemies to lovers”, they will categorize the whole book around that one ”tag”.
Can confirm this is true. Asia is dominating the fantasy market right now, and I only got success with my novel once I turned it from an epic into something I can only describe as a shonen book. I'm actually really struggling right now because I wanted my next book to be about court politics working against the queen to overthrow her but I have no clue how to make it interesting to an audience that mostly wants to see cool powers and individuals soloing everything with them.

>>25489909
You need that anyway. Or should. Actually, the more I read of contemporary litfic the more I get the sense it's all midwits aping people with actual talent.

>>25489899
This is a skill issue. As an author, if you aren't masturbating with words, your job is to produce something that people will enjoy and that will make their lives better. Slopmongers like Sanderson and the romantasy psychos have pared this down to the bare psychological minimum and are the literary equivalent of fent dealers. And what do we, the intellectual elite of the Internet do? We whine and expect normies to randomly start reading Milton and Austen and Dostoevsky out of nowhere. What we should be doing is finding out what people like and then PROVING that our fart sniffing intellectualism has value by creating art far superior to the slopmongers.
>BUT ADS COST MONEY!!!
OK so get a job

What I'm saying is rewrite Anna Karenina into a litrpg isekai story.

>>25489920
It's not as if I expect to be come the next Tolkien overnight but it's enough to make a grown man cry to know that no matter what I do or how hard I work I'll never really be able to succeed at writing what I want while crap writers like Brando Sando make mad bank with lines like "ASS SASS."

>>25489920
That's rough, something about Asian sensibilities in fiction is actively repugnant to me. Hearing "S tier" makes me nauseous.

It is dominated by smut-shit which sells

The idea that everything needs to be a long ass series or "cycle." Tell a single story. Fuck the Wheel of Time.

>>25489672
>What would you say is the biggest problem with fantasy literature nowadays?
That everyone acts like a person out of our current society. Especially like they're from particular western metropolises. Obviously. All other problems pale in comparison to this.

>>25489672
Women.

>>25489672
The authors are on social media and youtube and you can see they are massive faggots faster than you can get the books good or bad

>>25490002
I don't need things to be historically accurate or read like the Canterbury Tales and I think the term Whedonesue is dreadfully overused, but good Christ at least some effort at verisimilitude wouldn't go underappreciated. It's at a point where retards these days not only can't even read easy books they're completely unwilling to try.

They all talk like teenagers from California, constantly throwing unfunny quips while looking at the camera like Jim from the Office. If you must insert jokes, at least make them appropriate for the setting, not "yo momma" shit.

>>25489932
In their defense Tolkien wasn't the greatest at prose either and his overly detailed nature can be extremely overbearing in a way that was pretty unique at the time. What made Tolkein successful was his ideas and worldbuilding all had a cohesive theme and supported a moral framework he was clear on. If you can manage that and have good enough connections you will at least be able to do what you want while having an audience.

>>25490050
>In their defense Tolkien wasn't the greatest at prose either
Shut up.

>>25489847
Where on her body is there low body fat? Women with bodies sort of like (obviously it's not realistic) that in reality jiggle deliciously.
>>25489843
Objectively correct and bordering on self evident.

it's all written extremely millennially

i used to make fun of gurm but "the more she drank the more she shat pink mast her cunt became the world" is infinitely preferable to "soooo... THAT just happened!"

>>25490065
>Where on her body is there low body fat? Women with bodies sort of like (obviously it's not realistic) that in reality jiggle deliciously.
This type of delusion is the level that the average fantasy author has. It's absurd how many writers don't engage with the outside world.

>>25490074
I suggest you reread my post

Too much of a focus on lore and worldbuilding. Everyone wants to be Tolkien

>>25490070
That's gen x writing, you ignorant zoomer faggot.

>>25489814
Redditfag answer. Fantasy exists squarely in the platonic realm.

>>25489946
t. Judeo-Christian

>>25490216
Platonic ideals have to be manifested into symbols to be understood. If you don't understand how reality works creating symbols and understandable allegories become impossible.

>>25490228
History has nothing to do with reality thoughbeit

>>25490065
>Where on her body is there low body fat?
There is no way to have a physique like that and have a high fat %.

>>25489672
It's bad because authors try to write "fantasy" instead of just telling an original story that fits the genre. Meaning, it's all tropey bullshit copying others without a personal voice

>>25490255
I think the over genrefication of things is a major problem not just here but with most writing. It's easy to forget that a lot of tags and boxes we have for these things were labeled well after the works were created. I'll often see people try to ask does X count as Sword and Sorcery but that term was just something Lieber came up with almost as an aside but REH wasn't saying I'm writing sword and sorcery when he was doing Conan. He was just telling his stories.

>>25489672
It's all the same and derivative. You are kind of forced to read science fiction instead because all fantasy stories are the same.

>>25490268
Ironically, the best fantasy authors now write under the literary fiction label, in a kneejerk reaction to literary fiction authors' obsession with autobiography

>>25490252
there's no way to have fat ass, fat tits, fat legs, with fat folds on her back, and not have high body fat? what level of psychosis are you on, my dude?

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>>25490231
>History has nothing to do with reality thoughbeit
What does that even mean? Even when we're talking contemporary, that still covers at least several decades in the past.

>>25489672
women

>>25490472
I like *the idea* of women.

>>25490331
you have never seen a woman naked.

>>25490585
that's right, buddy. I have access to the internet and I have never seen a woman naked. they will write tales of my virtue. if you wish, you may be the first.

>>25490231
Modernity is so delusional and actually believes that they are beyond the mistakes recorded in history. People in the past were simply more aware and more honest about why they did things and universally believed in a spiritual reality beyond this one. You're even more delusional if you think that the architecture produced that most of these fantasy models copied had nothing to do with the mentality people had back then.

>>25490592
You absolutely haven't seen a real women because those women you see online are photoshopped up the ass. That is especially true for roided women.

>>25490602
>That is especially true for roided women.
is this approaching something akin to a concession?

>>25490585
I have and I agree with him.
>>25490592
Kek
>>25490602
My ex had a lower half reminiscent (no, obviously not exactly the same) of the op pic.

>>25490631
The lower half is possible, it's the upper half that's the issue. You're not getting tits that big and nothing even remotely close with that much fat distribution on the legs and with that much muscle.

>>25489672
The word "fantasy" originally meant dream. The old fantasy writers - Dunsany, Lear, MacDonald, Smith - understood this. They let their imaginations and their pens run wild and wove whatever they wanted from the stuff of dreams and fairy tales. Modern fantasy writers don't understand this. Modern fantasy isn't about fantasies, it's about rigidly adhering to the tropes and formulas of the "fantasy genre." A modern fantasy writer could never get away with a modest prose poem about an emporer's ennui or a short fairy tale about a shepherd who meets happiness. No, in the modern fantasy industry every story must be at least 3 novels of at least 200k words each, it must have a map, it must be about a ragtag band of young adults, and those characters must learn 6000 years of history to rediscover the old magic and stop the dark lord from taking over the continent. Oh, and it must be written at an 8th grade level, because you must assume that your audience is dumber than a 13 year old child. If you've read one fantasy series written after 1980, you've read them all. Fantasy went wrong when it stopped being the realm of imagination and became repetitive and boring.

>>25490639
Yeah and the lower half guarantees high bf%, that is the crux of the issue.

>>25490661
That is not high body fat on a woman, let alone enough to justify the size and the shape of the tits, and the waist makes it even more apparent how tacked on it is.

>>25490675
>That is not high body fat on a woman
Anonette, give up. This is tedious.

>>25489852
A lot of people, both readers and writers, mistake quantity for quality when it comes to worldbuilding. The best worldbuilding is usually done by authors who have a strong understanding of human behavior and a broad knowledge base, so they can just intuitively spin up worlds that make sense and feel real without necessarily needing to invent centuries of history and so on.

>>25489672
Not enough people as ambitious as Gene Wolfe

>>25489829
it isn't just a gatekeeping issue.
the supply of clever autistic english-speaking combat veterans isn't what it used to be. there hasn't been a draft in the anglosphere for a long time and it didn't take very long into the GWOT before smart people stopped signing up for combat positions.

>>25490893
It is funny how the harsher the time the better art. Lewis and Tolkien lived through some of the worst conflicts in history and turn out brilliance. People now, and I'm no exception, are possibly living the cushiest lives in human existence and have no reference of what of real tragedy is. We act like we're owed everything and as a result we produce crap that's eaten up without thought.

>>25489672
>What would you say is the biggest problem with fantasy literature nowadays?
Publishers lack diversity of taste so they flood the market with shit that is super similar to each other to chase trends.

Meanwhile the vast majority of readers refuse to give indie stuff a chance unless a massive paid social media campaign told them to first.

So right now really trope heavy romantacy has taken over published fantasy stuff.
Like I ain't against romantacy being a thing. I am just annoyed that it's the only thing being put out for the most part. Noting else is given marketing. Nothing else is really given a chance.

>>25490920
Harsh experiences are necessary for us to understand that there is a reality beyond ourselves and to transcend towards it. Modernity was designed to disconnect us from nature to the point that even killing is through impersonal drone strikes. This disconnection makes us unable to make art because you can't ease the soul when you lack one to begin with.

Tangentially related but I hate how fantasy covers suck now.

>>25490920
in this case i think it's the specific experience of combat that matters. gene wolfe served as infantry in the korean war, which was a less hellish environment than what tolkien and lewis saw in ww1. didn't matter. combat still induces and rewards a particular mindset you don't see in very many other environments.

>>25490967
I don't think it has to be war or even major hardship especially but any kind of major life experience which is something so many people are lacking when they live only through the media they consume.

>>25489672
I really dislike the obsession with using rape to show how mature your setting is. Like I don’t mind you including it or whatever but at a certain point, it becomes a parody of itself when you keep providing me graphic descriptions of a woman getting her head ripped off and then her being raped by 20 chads or whatever

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I really appreciate the fascination with using rape to show the very worst of your setting. I like you including it and everything but if you do it all especially well, it becomes an authentic expression of itself when you provide me with graphic descriptions of a woman using the corpse of a toddler as a blowjob fleshlight for a necrophilic morgue employee while consuming it (that's from an actual book btw) and even worse!

See this is sort of the problem. You got one side which is edgelords being edgy and on the other fagwads being faggy. Why can't anyone just rape in moderation.

>>25489899
>I don’t know if this is some manga influence or what?
With regard to this tagification, I would point the finger at fanfiction and web novels on one side and online databases and wikis on the other. I have noticed a frustrating tendency of people to approach works with the objective of extracting a specific element or aspect from it while disregarding the work as a whole, evaluating something based on how well it satisfies their desire for some archetype or trope, or based on how many lines of text it can yield for some fan wiki. The existence of these content-tagging systems enables prospective readers to navigate and filter works based on these tags which inevitably cultivates tag-oriented demand, which leads to writers writing around these tags, creating a feedback loop. Since anons have mentioned Tolkien, while I've never read the Lord of the Rings, I have read some of his scholarly writings and I think his protests are relevant here, about treating Beowulf as something to be mined for historical information while disregarding the work on its own terms. An individual work is both a gestalt and a fragment of the larger traditions which provide the form and the symbols which compose it.
The premise of worldbuilding combined with the modern copyright regime encounters the issues of originality and authority. A story is an individual work and a fragment of larger traditions from which it draws its form and constituent symbols. Traditional stories themselves take from conventional settings and characters, but while the modern author can take Troy or Camelot just as his predecessors did, he cannot take, for example, the settings of the Lord of the Rings or a Song of Ice and Fire without dealing with the authorities of those works/settings (or accepting derivative/unauthoritative status, ie. fanfiction). Now you can draft your own setting, but, especially from the top-down, this work is fractal in nature, and you also have to have the self-restraint not to exhaust the world you put all that thought into building, to avoid turning your story into an encyclopedia with a bit of story sprinkled in.

>>25489899
>Businessification.
This is the most remarkable way I've seen someone avoid using the word "capitalism" here when clearly complaining about the symptoms of capitalism

>>25489672
The problem is that writers nowadays fantasize about being conquered by women rather than wanting to conquer them.
Myself included.

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>>25491122
This is why shit like TV Tropes drives me up a wall. People want to act like their genre savvy for recognizing tropes but they break things down to ingredients rather than creations. This work is good because it has [INSERT TROPE NAME!] Or this one is subversive because it [DOESN'T DO TROPE NAME!] and then they reduce every possible action any character can take, any direction a story can take or any possible element of any kind into some prefab assembly line. That's not how things work. It's not how writing works. No one is willing to get outside their predefined notions and no one is willing to look at the whole. If you want a dumb food analogy nobody wants to eat around the onions.

I’m seriously exhausted by gritty and “realistic”

>>25491137
I think even GRRM is as well. I think he's learning pretty hard that subversion might shock people in the short term but sooner than you'd expect you have to give way to sincerity if you want your story to go anywhere.

>>25491142
I actually think Martin is much more of a romantic than both his critics and he himself would admit. Yeah his books are full of dark and edgy shit but there’s a lot of heroic stuff and redemption too. A true nihilist who thinks everything is shit would have played Jaime straight, not as a tragic character

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>>25491146
Moorcock was a thousand times more edgy than he.

>>25491122 (Me)
>An individual work is both a gestalt and a fragment of the larger traditions which provide the form and the symbols which compose it.
Sorry, I meant to delete this after writing it into another part but I forgot, the repetition was unintentional.

>>25490209
Not really. It was influenced by Whedon but I’d agree it degenerated heavily in the 2000s and especially the early 2010s. Remember the oldest millennials were born in the early 80s. They were active creative force from the mid 2000s on (T. 1980 elder millennial)

>>25491190
*sucks teeth* awkward...

>>25489852
>World Building
This without a doubt.

The confusion that writing excessive lore equates to a good story or narrative has really impacted other mediums and can completely dilute works. Writing in games as a whole is fucked from it. We're stuck with all these boring games with anachronistic characters inserted into some soft fantasy padded room of a world with expansive lore that just mirrors current events, I'm sure is also reflected in modern fantasy novels, I just can't be fucked to keep up with them

>>25491151
Some Morecock for sure. I don't think he's the worst offender, but he obviously was the one that opened the door. I do think that this branch of trying to subvert fantasy tropes with edginess is falling out of favor in the mainstream.

>>25490939
This. It all looks the same. Huge clipart sword or crown with the title in swirly letters

>>25491401
>this branch of trying to subvert fantasy tropes with edginess
Yes, done to the extreme, to the point it became the only thing it have to offer now.

>>25491401
>with edginess is falling out of favor in the mainstream.
I feel that has more to do with modern audiences not having the stomach for anything more intense than opening a coffee shop than it does a rejection of cynicism though. The books are still glibly subversive they just have the pointy bits sanded off.

>>25491618
modern audiences are sucking down shit like The Boys and Terrifier and Chainsaw Dicksplitter Massacre and whatever. only thing they don't have a taste for is heckin' racism and misogyny. anything else they guzzle by the gallonload like it's mana from heaven.

>>25491410
I just really miss when the cover art would spark the imagination. There's the adage of not judging a book by it's cover but I picked up plenty of favorites purely because the cover looked cool. A bland simplistic cover is even worse than a cover having a giant NOW A MOVIE/NETFLIX/AMAZON STREAMING badge on their you can't take off.

>>25491020
What book is that?

>>25489899
It's a spiritual thing.
There is now a hole the size of the entertainment industry in the hearts of the earthlings. All has been enshittified and all publishing is curated to ensure that remains the state to the bitter and smelly end.

People yearn for new and great experiences, but it has to involve the amazing -which causes envy and insecurity, and is banned.

>>25489672
I don't read femslop fantasy so I can only answer for the male webslop side, the scientification of magic. It's boring as hell, magic isn't science that's the whole point.

>>25491685
Science Fantasy and Fantasy being tied together isn't exactly a new concept, you know. You had a lot of series going way back like Dragon Riders of Pern or even John Carter that blend the two. I agree it's annoying as shit when it's done in the MCU style of "Thor's just an alien" but you're looking at the wrong issue.

>>25491693
>Science Fantasy
*Fiction. Me are am good typer

>>25489829
I thought brownoids infest the military now?

>>25489920
>I wanted my next book to be about court politics working against the queen to overthrow her
Sounds lame and gay

>>25490013
I thought Karl Edward Wagner was a good middle ground between gothic, evocative prose, and Peckinpah-esque dialogue

>>25491703
All greentext does that. To anything.
>Yo mama

>>25490050
Tolkien was overbearing because he was emulating the myths and historical records he spent his whole life studying.
Other authors are overbearing because they're just imitating Tolkien.

>>25491705
Sure would be nice if someone reprinted his books.

>>25491133
Especially frustrating because TV Tropes itself explicitly says not to use the site that way. It's supposed to be a fun site for pointing out trends that've been used in media, not use it as some sort of guide.
You're supposed to go "oh, these stories use a similar trope, that's neat!" and move on.

>>25491413
That's the difference between Moorcock and modern authors. Moorcock was talented enough that the subversive character of Elric became a staple archetype itself.

>>25491685
Magic and science have always been interlinked. If anything the separation of sci-fi and fantasy is part of the problem.

>>25491700
Hispanics are white enough
Also I was being overly bitter and sassy. It's a lot more general, like >>25490893 and >>25490932 describe. If there's one single reason I think it's something like "people don't live life anymore".

>>25491716
Gene Wolfe speaks on this definitively. They're two sides of the same coin. I forget where though, one of the interviews on YouTube I think.

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Armchair pesd answer incoming:

I think the main reason why fantasy literature has practically died out is because people's imaginations have died out BUT ONLY as the simplest or most satisfying form of entertainment. Now that video games exist you can literally live in and play in these worlds, where as once you could only watch them in a movie or read them in a book, which was the easiest way to feel like you were transported to another realm. I don't think fantasy literature was ever meant to be highbrow like that, but it's entertainment value is just less then the alternatives now.

>Cycle of Californication
>1054 pages
>book 1 of 4
>book 2 comes out 5 years later
>what book 3?

>>25489672
Only women read it, so all new releases cater to women, and especially dorky women's insecurities.

>>25489672
Lack of familiarity with myths, history and classical heroism

>>25491716
>Magic and science have always been interlinked
no way man, they're almost opposites. magic is imposition of the will upon the world, usually by a divine force but sometimes by mortals as well in those settings. technology is working within the confines of the world, manipulating it.
thought this is true for "hard" """magic""" but that is not magic and never has been

women unironically understand magic better than men, much as it pains me to say so. systematizing autists just can't grok it to save their lives.

>>25491818
Read Vance and Wolfe. Hell, Conan and Lovecraft themselves blurred the lines of magic and science.
Your definition of the two has always been [HEADCANON]

>>25491821
hard magic has always been soulless shit for retards. its popularity is why all fantasy sucks now. true magic is appealing to spirits or gods or more ephemeral sources of will, like your own mere belief that something being true makes it so.

your local crazy woman trying to control your mind by gifting your muffins with her period blood in them has a cooler idea for a magic system than all these faggots.

>>25491830
None of the shit I mentioned was "hard" magic. In fact, it's link to science is how everything is "unexplained".
To the average man, a magic spell might as well be indistinguishable from hyper advanced science.

>>25489672
"The biggest problem with fantasy literature is people asking what the problem with fantasy literature is."

>>25489814
"If you can draw from reality, then you can learn how to give back to reality."

>>25489672
That it's all fucking isekai/elseworld/reincarnation shit.

It's all pandering to the lowest, common denominator loser escaping into a world where the reader self-insert(because they're not even a character) is 'The One guy with a niche informed skill that makes them SSSS+ rank". We have departed from Joseph Campbell's 'Hero's Journey' so much, that anything remotely close to character development and growth is completely foreign. No lessons can be learned from a story where the only narrative is "the nerd gets his revenge because he cheats his way to the top of the food chain".

We need stories of struggle and effort, the type of shit that when you put it down, would make you evaluate some of your own life choices. Inspiring, not coddling.

Also, what >>25489852 said. We need more living, breathing worlds that aren't just "It's like every other RPG world, you know what an RPG is, right? Magic and dragons and elves."

>>25489672
It fails to divorce itself from medieval Europe, and from Tolkien. The world building is almost invariably partly, or wholly based on these two, and they shouldn't be.

>>25491944
>That it's all fucking isekai/elseworld/reincarnation shit.
The vast majority of that stuff isn't even professionally published.
At least if you are talking about western literature and the mainstream western fantasy market.

Most of what you are complaining about is mainly a Japan/east Asian thing.

>>25489672
Genre-Incest, it only attracts writers that grew up with Fantasy stories and replicate the same yotry beats without even understanding the themes of the stories they copy. There is nothing wrong with being derivative of tropes, Tolkien also took heavy inspirations from older mythology, but with a proper understanding to form his fantasy world into a new mythos. Modern Fantasy writers are unable to do so, they just copy the flanderised tropes from whatever writer that defined the fantasy subgenre they are writing for without even considering the circumstances and themes that made the worldbuilding and plot of these stories so memorable.
Another major problem tied to the first lack is the lack of religion and spirituality. Fantasy is a genre that arguably only exists because of these two aspects, but in our materialistic word we are unable to comprehend, yet even convey such mentalities on paper which results in modern fantasy feeling like a vapid cargo cult that can only emulate its predecessors on a surface level.

How do some of you empiric fags live with the fact that Kant proved that the human mind doesn't need first-hand experiences to grasp a concept? According to your logic, I could never write about the horrors of starvation during a medieval siege as all the variables that are linked with that are only reliably measured by experiencing it myself as the modern soldier in a trench got other variables

>>25490117
this, lore has become a crutch so that shit writers have an excuse to not prioritize narrative or improve their prose

>>25492032
Indeed; the relief from this compaction necessitates breaking taboos. The real taboos, of speaking and exploring the unspoken, not just horror.

>>25492123
Doesn't this merely demonstrate genetic or Akashic memory?
At least that's what I would go for if I were an empiricist.

>>25491833
Dread is distinct from fear.
Magic is not unknown to mages.

>>25489895
The Faerie Queene and arguably The Divine Comedy are fantasy, dufus.

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>>25491712
Joseph Campbell that website AIN'T. Whatever the creator may have set out to do he Dr Frankensteind himself one of the greatest monsters of the internet. It's become little more than an excuse for fanboys to find ways to list the thing their a fanboy of in as many places as possible while inventing garbage new terms for even the most basic of actions.
>This character did this better make it part of the trope list.
>This character DIDN'T do something even though it wasn't so much as brought up or suggested? SUBVERTED!

>>25489895
Based Chateaubriand enjoyer

>>25491661
Dead Inside by Chandler Morrison

>>25489814
>the decline in quality is proportional to the historical education of the author.
Close; the decline is due to living through "The End of History"

The great writers of the 20th century personally experienced some absolutely crazy shit during the World Wars, and knew a bunch of other people who also experienced a bunch of crazy shit

>Roald Dahl
Fighter pilot, possible Ace, ruined his back and got sent to America to be IRL James Bond fucking wealthy old ladies to get their husbands to support the British in WW2
>Ian Fleming
Was basically M irl for British commando teams operating ahead of the allied advance into Germany
>Kurt Vonnegut
POW in Dresden during the bombing
>Robert Heinlein
USNA, Naval intelligence in the interwar period, worked in Civil affairs during the War with Isaac Asimov and L Sprague de Camp
>Tolkien
The trenches.

Tolkien says his books aren't allegorical to the war, and I believe him. However, he and the other top writers of the middle 20th century had a breadth and depth of personal experience that contemporary writers overwhelmingly lack.

>>25492521
We are also going through a lot of shit. However, it's all psychological and chemical, subtle and pervasive. Fiction is both the cure and another obstacle.

>>25492342
My problem is that all of it now seems to be a soulless copy-paste of D&D and Lotr

>>25492557
The world outside of the West is getting bombed, starved to death, and all the other issues related to war. The problem is the West is doing it through drones and completely impersonal forms of warfare which means people are further detached from what's going on. Through the surveilance state and parasitical nature of modern taxation we are now more involved in war than ever before but rather than embrace this as truth fiction has essentially been used to cause a mass psychosis and fiction now gets promoted only to help maintain it.

>>25492564
The technological surveillance-entertainment apparatus is the modern day opium war. The addiction is ruining people and devouring their lives.

>>25490988
I hate this too. Robin Hobb is super popular at the moment, and her books are littered with rape and implied rape. Her setting is a world where every girl gets raped if she doesn’t have a male protector at all times.

>>25492639
Somehow this will be men's fault

>>25491125
How would a command economy run by a communist party fix this exactly. How is abolishing all private publishers and replacing them with The People’s Fantasy Publishing House going to fix it

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>>25492676
Any command economy, not necessarily a communist one in particular, could solve this by appointing me personally as the official state taste maker so I could promote edifying works of literary merit and have slopmongers blacklisted from the arts for life and enslaved.

>>25489711
fpbp

>>25489672
It's unoriginal and focuses more on world building and other autistic slop.
For publishings' obsession with Africans, why hasn't anyone written the African LotR yet? The fact that is so much diverse African mythos to draw upon and create a fantasy world unlike any other is a travesty, it just shows how uncreative the people being pushed are and how they get by through trends rather than quality, such as any romantasy author.

>>25492726
Anon..Do you need the obvious answer? It's not about creating a unique world, it's about co-opting an existing one.

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>>25490934
>This disconnection makes us unable to make art because you can't ease the soul when you lack one to begin with.
I'm using this in the future and I'll give you credit.

>>25491720
>Hispanics are white enough
they don't read, and anything they write now is basically asian-american female diaspora tier.

A lot of people in this thread are saying it's because modern writers don't know anything about the world or history. That's the impression I get, people write fantasy based on nothing but the fantasy books they've read. But are there any contemporary writers who are the exception?

>>25489672
Tolkien ruined fantasy by making dwarves (greedy gold-loving Jews) the good guys and big empires the bad guys. Everyone else just copied Tolkien.
Martin and Erikson at least get points for trying to do something different.

>>25492032
I think mixing genres is fine, it's the fact that they're just copying tropes and other stories that is the main problem. If someone wants to write fantasy they should focus on present day real life and history. They would be better off reading conspiracy/alternative theories about history on some obscure website than just copying fantasy books they read.

>>25492911
I appreciate it. Reading and interacting with the world while broke all your 20s makes you realize a lot of truths about the world.

You see the trailer for the shitty new Golden Axe show? That's the problem. I'm not going to look at it because then I would have to look at it. And it makes me furious.

Writing became really derivative in the Greek speaking world in the centuries following Alexander's death, because the vast wealth of his heirs allowed them to lavish enough money on the arts that writing became a full time profession for those lucky enough to score a sinecure. Writing as a craft quickly developed strict yet arbitrary rules and a tendency among authors to reference each other rather than draw on real life. It also saw the bifurcation of writing into mass produced lowbrow slop for the masses and pretentious pseudery aimed at fellow writers who mistook ever more rarified iterations of their familiar approved formulas for art.

In the modern West we experience an explosion of good(and bad tbf) writing in the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century, when millions of people were flooding into the cities from the countryside and small towns so that white collar professionals often had eclectic backgrounds as hayseed rubes, war veterans, fallen aristocrats, steel workers, drifters etc. We stopped producing good writing when it stabilized into a profession with well known conventions, expectations, and gatekeeping mechanisms. Just like what happened in the Hellenistic era. The tastemakers and patrons of the arts in the Hellenistic era and our own were bourgeois bureaucrats in both cases, so part of the problem is that comfortable mediocre paper pushers have always had bad taste and always will.

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>>25490209
You're right unc, here's your millennial garbage instead

>>25489672
In a year it's gonna be all AI with some human editing

>>25492563
Yes well obviously derivative dogshit is derivative dogshit, that has nothing to do with genre. The vast majority of litfic is also imitative midwit trash.

>>25492726
I don't know about African LotR, but African Conan exists. It's called Imaro, by Charles Saunders.

>>25490020
>while looking at the camera like Jim from the Office
This is another part of it, every author is trying to write a TV show script and not a novel.

>>25489672
Lack of good storytelling

>>25493467
Holy shit shad is bad

Written by morons who are questionably literate.

>>25492726
So worldbuilding is okay if it is African?

>>25492726
Subtle admission that european mythos and history is just cooler.

>>25491631
You have no idea how right you are. The woke types I know write the goriest, edgiest shit, with incest and self mutilation. But if I crack a joke about female drivers being bad they act like I'm the one upsetting everyone.

>>25489672
Women

>>25494944
This is typical human behavior. Our Guys can be trusted to be on the side of righteousness at the end of the day, so there's no harm in indulging their questionable idiosyncrasies. Their Guys can't be trusted so we have to crack down on them when they make the slightest transgressions.

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>>25489672
Over emphasis on character drama, therapy shit and general lack of writing quality.

>>25495044
Sando makes me miss reading R.A Salvatore

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>>25489928
>What I'm saying is rewrite Anna Karenina into a litrpg isekai story.
nta but I have been planing an anthology that could have some appeal to Litrpg and Romantasy fans. The problem is I hate litrpgs, isekai and TikTok. I have had some people irl tell I shuld start a TikTok acount to post my rants about how much I hate the modern world. However, I don't think the onions-things over there would respond well to me saying "everything you like is shit and for faggots. Fallow me on Substack to read my fiction and essays."

>>25489672
almost all modern fantasies are written as if they were political thrillers instead of epics

>>25495044
Dear god no room for the imagination for Wind and Truth. I often talk about reading a book is basically just hallucinating for a couple hundred pages a day but forcing me to give a shit about a character when nothing is bringing me into the story to imagine is painful.

>>25496660
What about epics do you wish were more in modern fantasy? More emphasis on ideals as the center for the story? More flowery prose that makes the mundane seem otherworldly? I'm curious as someone who wants to write an epic but is forced to modernize. I desperately want to find a way to balance it.

>>25496740
>? More emphasis on ideals as the center for the story? More flowery prose that makes the mundane seem otherworldly?
It's mainly this but another thing is how character arcs are not intertwined with the plot and aren't allowed to follow the traditional path trauma and character flaws can never be overcome only lived with. Brandon Sanderson is probably the best example for all of these. I have no doubt that even in the final book Kaladin will still be struggling with PTSD and Shallan will still be depressed or bipole or whatever her issue is.

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>>25489672
Is this the Grim Dawn: Thighs of Asterkarn general?

>>25489672
It's aimed at women and gays.

>>25496891
>Septum piercing and otherwise pretty feminine
KINO

>>25496992
ah, I didn't even notice till you mentioned that. Gross.

Take your pick:
>wanna be writers who don't fucking read anything, fumbling around the page with cliches and purple prose and exposition dumps, who get irrationally angry when no one can stomach more than half a page of their run-on-sentence crap
>publishers only being interested in young adult Harry Potter/Hunger Games crap or "romantasy" porn
>the tropification of genre literature
>the insistence that fantasy needs to be a series, and it needs to drag on for thousands of pages, with stupid subplots and pointless side characters, until it eventually has a big dumb ending, or no ending at all, which is even worse.
>everything needs to be pro-feminism and pro-diversity with token they characters who casually mention how bisexual them are so lock in for the five-millionth princess who was democratically elected into royalty and can totally handle a sword all by herself
>either Tolkien adjacent or Avatar Airbender adjacent

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>DUDE LORE LMAO

>>25496759
I don't like the hyper focus on individual issues either. Real historical heroes saw themselves as mere manifestations of divine forces and modern fantasy cannot compute this as modernity is extremely hyper individual and cannot fathom such a concept. I was advised against and lack the talent to revive classical prose but I'll be keeping this in mind since, while you're in a vocal minority, you are my actual target audience.

>>25489672
the reason why fantasy sucks. Martin would like to use castles and dragons. the reason why there is hell otherwise becomes "the end the 666" x the reasons pertaining to Martin's writing are being that there isn't roomu in the families of that realm to kill any enemy that suggested Martin was "a hell opposed to sensing the blood that became 666 X the one GOT exceptional", this guy wants you to like as I say potion-hadrons down force on the bearers for bone writing Danerys from netflix, if that sounds up our alley we kill fucking with fire.

Anon you want good fantasy you're otherwise going to have to tell Tolkien delirium get black and let yourself up and know that even Martin should have got war right meaning that cucks of books should have been sent to Satan or his equivalent and everyone wanting to invest in an improvement to the genre of fantasy need to take it up with the worst in these days terrible writing to depict a new way of writing in where everything the secret of writing if good and pure it must be black i.e. the fathers. (femslops should die)

..

stop rehashing Tolkien.
take Cirth make it headier make a feel in body: war sells like crack.
cut out the dwarves speech.
for wars with the Fairlings is a story that should kill the CIA.
I am telling you dwarves speech has killed plot.
that's enough of this judeo dogshit.

I think everyone knew but I rewrite it.

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>>25496759
>>25497154
I'm fine with rugged individuals in fantasy

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>>25497425
We need harder figures. More grand characters.

>>25489829
>>25490893

I'm a clever autistic english-speaking white combat veteran... is this a niche I should be exploiting?

>>25489672
It’s feminized. I tried to read the Sun Eater series and holy shit is the main character a massive cuck pussy

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>>25497425
I think we ought to RETVRN to short stories as a popular medium.

>>25499328
"You grow sober with authority," quoth Amalric. "Such madness as that was always your particular joy."

>>25491125
No it's using a specific word over a vague ideological one. Invoking capitalism is like saying the devil did it. No one knows what it means and for those who have inkling it is not an intellectual word but a character in their pseudo mythology.