What are your most hated sci-fi/fantasy tropes?
What are your most hated sci-fi/fantasy tropes?
I have a few:
- Chosen ones, fate, destiny, &c. When you get down to it, a story with these themes is one where a single person or handful of people is ontologically, cosmically better and more important than everyone else. It's eerily similar to that right-wing meme about how "most people are just NPCs" (though I disliked the trope before that meme ever took off).
- Way too much importance being given to bloodlines by the narrative (note, this is different from them being given importance by characters or societies in the story).
- All of the good characters are handsome and beautiful, while all of the evil characters are ugly and disfigured (with the possible exception of a femme fatale or two).
- Races that are inherently, unchangeably evil down to the last individual regardless of upbringing, society, or material circumstances.
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I'd like to see more fantasy backgrounds that aren't medieval Europe, China and Japan with the serial numbers filed off.
Perhaps trying to build something into a respectful Arab, African, Native American or SE Asian mythos is just begging for tone-deafness. But there's plenty of opportunity to run the clock forward.
I'll give points for steampunk and related genres, but some of it seems too prone to passing as self-parody (I know there's an entire community devoted to Weird West stuff)
It feels like any sort of "how do we run an information-age society on magic" is surprisingly scarce outside the robust world of modern-era vampire/were bodice-rippers. Give me a world where the humane society is trying to unload a litter of gryphons. Make the Huawei corporation led by a cabal of mages. Have election deepfakes that are actually clones made of cornmeal and talismans that melt when they get wet.
You're looking for the urban fantasy genre. There's scads of it.
I remember an ancient short story where the world finds out magic is real when the fbi breaks in on a bunch of atomic scientists speaking a weird language over a nuke. The feds try them as russian spies so they admit that science doesn't really work, it was magic all along, and they were chanting the "nuclear bomb" spell in enochian. Then, before anyone can freak out about it, a wizard uses mind control to win the presidential election fair and square and everyone shrugs and goes on with their lives.
Check out China Mieville's Bas Leg cycle, starting with Perdido Street Station. Read all the cws, first. It is horror. But China's a comrade and the world he creates features class conflict, imperialism, and other bad things in a way that makes it much more vivid and frightening than a lot of dorky bright-eyed steampunk stories.
Netflix used to have historical fiction stories about Turkey called Etrugl. I quite liked it.
I used this series for research. It's on YouTube now. There's hundreds of episodes.