this is matociquala's fault (and she says it's <user site="live

[truepenny]

Eleven things I will serve my best never to put in a fantasy novel unless I am trying to undermine them, and in fact could do without entirely from now on, thanks

1. The word "orb." Unless we're talking about orb-weaver spiders, in which case, rock on.

2. Beauty correlating with goodness.

3. Quests.

4. Protagonists who are protagonists by virtue of being Special, particularly if their Specialness correlates with #2.

5. Telepathic companion animals.

6. Young women who live in a cod-medieval society and yet, somehow, are athletic, assertive, bad at sewing, and generally dressed in trousers. See also #4.

7. Social predators (thieves, assassins, etc.) with whom the reader is supposed to sympathize. Particularly if we're supposed to sympathize because of #4.

8. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL.

9. Heteronormativity. Likewise sexism, Default Fantasy Caucasianism, and the unquestioned assumption of middle-class values.

10. What Edward Gorey called P.R.O.s (Priceless Ritual Objects). See also #1, #3.

11. Saving The World. See also #8.

Comments

[khriskin]

But--but, number five is the main reason I read books when I was in junior high! It's just not good escapism without talking wolves, or horses, or dragons, or ducks, or bunnies or something! ^_^ *grin*

Or talking spaceships, those work too...

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Yes; I can agree with foregoing everything but telepathic companion animals. It's hard to imagine a story that couldn't be enhanced by the presence of a telepathic companion animal.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

6. Young women who live in a cod-medieval society and yet, somehow, are athletic, assertive, bad at sewing, and generally dressed in trousers.

damn. :)

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I feel guilty of one of those.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Hey, you have to have muscles to chase cows and knead bread!

As for world-saving, I'm all for it. *g*

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Neither of which the girls in #6 generally do.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

I can't agree that #7 is in itself a bad idea. A lot of kitsch has been written about such characters; also a lot of great literature.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It's not like I haven't done it myself anyway.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

But when you come down to it social predators aren't sympathetic to others, which makes them generally less sympathetic to me.

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

*casts mental eye over own work in progress*

Title? Contains #1, which is also the subject of a quest #3 carried out by someone who will soon end up with #5, come to think, though if I remember clearly they were enchanted into that form by an evil sorcer..

Bugger. She's definitely gay though, if that's any help?

Also re: #5, you've got it in for Anne McCaffrey but good, I take it? ::grin::

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

The book matociquala and I have coming out next year, A Companion to Wolves, is fundamentally the question: So, what about the green dragonriders, then?

[carbonel]

6. Young women who live in a cod-medieval society and yet, somehow, are athletic, assertive, bad at sewing, and generally dressed in trousers. See also #4.

I'm listening to Catherine, Called Birdy as a book on tape, which is about a young woman in a genuinely medieval society (1290-1, to be precise). She's reasonably athletic, definitely assertive (which gets her cracked -- her term -- by her father quite a bit), and is lousy at sewing. When the privy is cleaned, a number of spindles and an embroidery project are found in the muck, and she can't understand why everyone just assumes that they were hers.

She does not, however, wear trousers.

[handworn.livejournal.com]

Orbs? Will you then also never use the word "sceptre"?

What, if I might inquire, does "cod-medieval" mean? I've never seen the fish word used as an adjective. Except "codpiece." Which I admit is medieval.

----------

"They're EEEEEEEVIL, I tell you. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL!"

"Grandpa, you said that about all the presents."

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

"I just want attention."

[ronin-kakuhito.livejournal.com]

I read it as "Cash on Delivery"

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

cod=fake

(It's British slang I picked up from godknowswhere.)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

11. Saving The World. See also #8.

I always felt sorry for the non-FTL using aliens in the DC Comics Universe. About once a year, the entire universe is threatened by something on or near Earth. If you are Jo Alien, watching on the telescope, every light year you are from Earth means that the events you are watching is one year deeper into the past, so for all you know the good guys already lost a thousand centuries ago* and Doom is On It Way.

* DCU clearly has a special frame in which events are uniquely ordered.

[euterpe35.livejournal.com]

hi... I found your entry here through caprine.

This one:

"2. Beauty correlating with goodness."

YES, PLEASE. I am so sick of that I could just puke. Thanks :)

[floatingtide.livejournal.com]

Re: #8

Today I'm much more fed up with the overly righteous than I am with nineteen-capital-Es-Evil.

I should go put my badly-sewn trousers on my "lithe body" and seek out an Orb that will defeat goodness.

[lissa-dora.livejournal.com]

What a wonderful idea for a story!

Are you going to write it? If not, do you mind if I do?

Alternately, if you actually find such an orb, may I borrow it? *grins*

[secondsilk.livejournal.com]

Very interesting list.

My original story has mystical orbs (it's one of the two things to still be in from the original fourth-grade-assigment draft). But they are always refered to a balls, and they don't do anything.
I also got rid of the telepathetic animals when I was in year eight. I want trees that can be communicated with, but I'm not sure how to write them in.

Most of the last three years has been spent rethinking character relationships and personalities so that everything is much less Mary-Sue like.

I'm beginning to get worried now that people aren't going to recognise that my story is fantasy. It doesn't have magic, telepathic animals, any appearances from gods or an Evil overlord.
Maybe it isn't. In which case I have no idea what I'm writing.

[jodi-davis.livejournal.com]

I am totally calling dibs on *rondure* - I mean it - I just changed ALL the lighting fixtures in my whole fucking castle!

[storytellersjem.livejournal.com]

#6 is clearly overdone. GRRM and Keyes both have tom boy girls in their fantasy series.

That said, it is a popular archetype, too, so one has to decide what to do with it.

And, I would add, there are historical examples of assertive medieval noble women . .. Eleanor of Aquitaine being one of the more famous figures. That said, she grew up in a culture that gave a lot more independence to women and when she married into other regions she had some conflict over the matter.
Unlike many tom boy girls, she used her feminine charms to achieve her desires.

[borntofr4g.livejournal.com]

"5. Telepathic companion animals."

I strangely never seem to ever get anywhere near fantasy that has this. I don't mean I avoid it---I mean I never seem to end up drifting anywhere near it in the first place. Never did and still don't.

"6. Young women who live in a cod-medieval society and yet, somehow, are athletic, assertive, bad at sewing, and generally dressed in trousers. See also #4."

Public enemy #1!: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Aika.gif

"9. Heteronormativity. Likewise sexism, Default Fantasy Caucasianism, and the unquestioned assumption of middle-class values."

*cringe* This induces the urge for a Wookiee-barf in me. I have a theory (maybe several) for this, though, at least for the Default Fantasy Caucasian part: The authors afflicted with said bitties tend to be white middle-classers, so that's the first factor. Second factor is that they lack a way to create minority characters who are independent and productive and generally well-to-be and functional-seeming people that don't seem white at the same time (this ties in with a theory my politicky buddies and I have, which is that one reason many minorities have trouble being found in positions of status is because they unfortunately associate success with 'being white'---this is probably truer for African-Americans than other minorities, though). There was another reason for this, but I forget it. Actually, in this whole regard I may be thinking of Token Minority SYndrome, which seems to be a bigger problem with sci-fi than fantasy so far as I've seen. My best guess is that in short the people afflicted with these two problems is that the authors are caught between a desire to include minority characters who are proactive and functional on a level equal with the other characters, and on the other hand have trouble writing minority characters that, at least to them, are not stereotypical. So basically our problem may be political correctness.

"11. Saving The World. See also #8."

Someone needs to write a book where the protagonist is concerned solely with saving the flower garden. Or the fridge. Or the bathroom. Or some other household sector.

[robling-t.livejournal.com]

8. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL.

Oh, hear, hear -- I much prefer "motives (that could plausibly be equally valid) that happen to be opposed to the Protagonist's", m'self.

And while we're at it, could we please lock all those Long Lost Heirs in a trunk somewhere? It's especially embarrassing to see American writers unquestioningly lining up behind the Divine Right of Kings all the time, dammit...

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Though it's also embarrassing to see modern American values of the virtues of democracy embraced whole-heartedly in supposed medieval settings, particularly when placed against a caricature of feudalism with every vice of every imaginable way for feudalism to degenerate and none of the virtues of a functional feudal society.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

2. Beauty correlating with goodness.

Amen. Though waving one's arms around to make a point of how one's protagonist is not blonde, tall, and Barbie-shaped, in a context where it makes no damn sense for that to be a standard of attractive anyway - where enough body fat to last out a bad winter is a serious selective advantage, freex - also fails to work for me.

4. Protagonists who are protagonists by virtue of being Special

I can rather like that, particularly if it's a value of Special that comes with at least as many drawbacks as benefits. Just about any form of fantasy magic has some degree of Specialness inevitably associated with practitioners, no ?

9. Heteronormativity. Likewise sexism, Default Fantasy Caucasianism, and the unquestioned assumption of middle-class values.

Yes, but, there's a Morton's Fork here. Write what I personally grew up with, and I'm going to be guilty of Default Fantasy Caucasianism [ either that or making stuff up from whole cloth, or people who are arguably Caucasians painted purple at birth or something ]; write outside of that, and yet another hydra head of the great floating cultural appropriation debate comes along to bite me.

11. Saving The World. See also #8.

I don't know. There are things on a scale that worlds, or at least global human communities, can legitimately need being saved from them; Michael Scott Rohan's take on doing that with an Ice Age in the Winter of the World trilogy I have really liked for a long time.

More generally, on the "I will not do this except to subvert it" front, there's also a question in how long you get to set something up and establish precisely what it is you are subverting; I think that someone who only read the first one or two of the Vlad Taltos series would miss basically all of what Steve Brust does to subvert the social-predator-as-Cool thing later on.