Ask Lemmy

"I am not [well known character archetype]"

does literally everything possible to follow that archetype

^cough^ ^cough^ ^one^ ^piece^ ^cough^ ^cough^

More than 17 apostrophes on the first page with every name of a person, place, or thing having one.

Elves always being like the bottom rung of society or them being the outcasts. It's insane to think that elves wouldn't be the rulers of dam near any government or at the very least not be the power and influence behind a puppet government. Who wouldn't want the help of a race of people who, depending on the lore, can live for thousands of years.

I mean, there could be an elf that has been a friend of your family for like 5 or more generations. That sounds dope as fuck for us but kinda shitty for them.

girls falling in love with the main character and wanting to stay with him for the rest of the story just because they have met random.

Being forbidden doesn't make a relationship interesting. The Romeo and Juliet thing has been spun a million times, and every one of them is shit including the original.

Women and girls usually end up in a relationship by the end of the story and/or are the ones needing to be rescued. Its formulaic, boring and sexist due to the comparative lack of the opposite occurring. eg. men needing to be rescued.

Like... even if you did not give a single shit about sexism, its the same tired plot points over and over again. It has Hallmark channel writer energy. Create a second plot I beg you.

I absolutely hate the trope where they start out with something interesting and have to do a flashback to the parts that led up to it. Like I just had that happen with a sequel to a book I was reading, and I'm really struggling to get started. I fucking hate the

*cold open to something dramatic happening*

Record scritch "I bet you're wondering how I got here. Well, it all started...."

bullshit trope and its really hard for me to look past some times.

So far I’ve discovered in this thread:

-People don’t like traditional fantasy that takes itself seriously.
-People don’t like lighthearted fantasy that plays with the themes.
-People don’t like hard magical systems.
-People don’t like soft magical systems.
-People don’t like dragons being involved.
-People don’t like an absence of dragons.
-People don’t like character archetypes.
-People don’t like counterarchetypes.
-People don’t like when characters speak an understandable language.
-People don’t like characters meeting each other in common social meeting areas.

All good here? Great.

Just write whatever the fuck you want. There’s always an audience.

Not necessarily a writing trope, but a casting trope in fantasy TV/film that always annoyed me: British accent = fantasy accent. It's not so bad these days, but a lot of 2000s-era fantasy would just have all the actors speak in awfully fake British accents.

For one thing, too many works of fiction involve a romance. I don't judge the romances itself, I would never get between even multiple people in love when on a screen, but these things don't always have to be in the boundaries of the story. Even works like DC Comics which promote themselves on a realism basis give romances out like a token. Which is why the ending to Battleship saved that movie in my eyes.