Fantasy cliches to avoid

[Philip Overby]

I like Chilari's idea. If there was a Chosen One for everything, it could be like a socialist society of Chosen Ones. Reminds me of City of Ember, where each kid was randomly assigned a job once they reached a certain age.

I wish life was really like that. Then I could finally be the Chosen One of Ice Cream Truck Drivers like I always dreamed.

 

[James Chandler]

Dark Lords. If there has to be an over-arching bad guy, at least give some motivation as to why he's so evil. I've become rather sick of beings whose only reason for existence is so the hero can eventually overcome him/her/it. At least the villain in Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow & Thorn had a reason to be grumpy.

This has always been on my most despised cliche list, because it is almost always a variation on Tolkien. At the same time, it has been used successfully over and over again. While I do not like the use of the Dark One form the Wheel of Time, I still enjoy the series.

 

[Derin]

In my opinion, any cliche is fair game so long as it's not cliche for cliche's sake. If the story evolves naturally and the end result has similarities to other stories, that's good. If you throw in dragons and secret long-lost princes and highly skilled standoffish warriors disgraced by some past crime they may or may not have been framed for because you think that's what fantasy stories are meant to have, that's not good.

I tend to go along with any story if I like the writing and the characters, whether the plot is unique or not. (Although it helps to offer at least one thing different to other fantasy stories; a new play on a species or an unusual philosophy, for example.) My exception is the "surprise" twist of the main character being secretly related to the Big Bad and/or their mentor, which always irritates me.

 

[Black Gate of Mordor]

Cliches are simply things that have been successful in the past, and because of that success are over-used by worse authors, and over time the reader's tolerance for them becomes shorter and shorter. Then you reach our time, where most readers probably won't read a book about Good vs. Evil because it's boring now. Over-written. Then you have others who really don't care what it's about, if it's written well they'll still read it.

 

[DameiThiessen]

Magical portal that allows someone from "real" world to access "fantastic" one… often repeatedly. (Narnia, of course… a similar mechanism was used by Edgar Rice Burroughs for his SF "John Carter of Mars" series. Lewis Carroll had the decency to have his looking-glass only work once.)

Well, there's A) All characters exist within a magical world that the author creates, B) Person from the real world travelling over to another magical world, or C) Person in the real world getting tangled up with magic in the real world.

Pretty much all fantasy does one of these three, or a combination of them. I don't think it's fair to call them cliche. Certain elements of them might be - like that fact that fantasy islands only seem to be about a mile wide yet contain 6 different biomes - but each by itself isn't that bad.

 

[gavintonks]

I am posting this in a few threads as I have become to notice that many people consider a "travelogue through their imagination" is a story. It is not the imagination is purely the substitute for characters within a well crafted and entertaining story. This is not creating a game it is writing and entertaining and gripping story that may or may not exist somewhere but it it the story that must be real first.,