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askchapo @hexbear.net BeamBrain [he/him] @hexbear.net

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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  • Feel like I should post a link to the first chapter of my fantasy novel, Byzantine Wars, which defies all or nearly all of these annoying tropes. You can read the whole thing there for free, although that website is kind of not my favorite. I can also just send an epub to those who message me. All I ask is that if you like it, please share it with other people who might be interested. The story is basically Jumanji in Byzantium, plus slave revolt, with a magic system mostly inspired by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

    The tropes I countered were:

    • chosen one(s): peasants and workers are the heroes, people can only change things by working together in the name of universal human liberation (the "bad guys" can only fight them by acting like vampires); it's not good versus evil, it's imperialists versus workers; anyone can learn how to use magic;
    • the only people who care about bloodlines are imperialists;
    • good characters look like shit, bad characters are beautiful;
    • Many different cultures are represented here, with many different characters belonging to one culture or another; there are many good and bad Greeks, Muslims, Jews, etcetera, along with plenty of Kurds, Iranians, Africans, Arabs, Armenians, Roma, Assyrians, Turks, Georgians, and more!
    • the story is about the Roman Empire versus a slave republic; the Roman government is generally depicted negatively, but most Romans support it; the slave republic is generally depicted positively, though its leaders and people argue with each other and question one another;
    • the slaves aren't afraid to do violence against Romans and rarely hesitate to use their own weapons against them;
    • I'm super annoyed at how the most popular fantasy series (Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, even Harry Potter) just ignore economics almost completely. We see cities that consist of a castle, and that's it. How do these people get their food? Where are their farms? So I definitely paid a lot more attention to this, but worked it into the story. I'm not a fan of writers like KSR interrupting their stories with miniature magazine articles.
    • the series mostly takes place in what is now Turkey, Georgia, and the Middle East.
    • honestly I like how GRRM includes disabled people in his work (even if he sucks in many other ways) so that was one thing I went for;
    • no SA or very little SA;
    • the barbarians are more civilized than the Romans;
    • women can be horny but are not just objects of lust;
    • four main characters: two good ones, one "morally gray" one (sorry), one bad one;
    • plenty of trans people (redditors call this "presentism": CW transphobia but
    spoiler

    didn't you know that trans people never existed until a few years ago and anyone writing about trans people is just inserting George Soros's woke agenda to virtue signal about how pure and good they are unlike me, a redditor who readily admits that he is scum? :::);

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