Here's the thing: My Creative Writing professor assigned us a short story to write. It can be "about anything you want. Except elves." I had mised thoughts on that. On one hand, I was thinking "I know, right? I f***ing hate elves." And on the other: "Sure, elves are stupid, but they don't have to be. You could write an elf detective story if you wanted to."
Hmm. I'll have to get back to you on that.
The point is, fantasy is what you make it. That is what it used to mean to "fantasize" - to come up with something completely new. Not to blindly follow the Tolkien-Eddings paradigm. Tolkien knew what he was doing when he wrote and epic quest, drawing on all sorts of mythology stuff. That is why the only thing resembling epic fantasy I can read anymore is The Last Rune series by Mark Anthony; because he, like Tolkien, pays attention to the epic myth, so that even though he tropes up the wazoo, he still manages to convey a sense of awesome.
That and I have two-inch thick nostalgia goggles.
So what if you don't like myths? They're silly, outdated, nonsensical, boring. Guess what? You can still write fantasy. Set it in modern day? Urban fantasy! Set it in a world with technology analogous to our own but they have MAGIC? Go right ahead! That is the whole point of fantasy. You can do whatever the heck you want.
Take Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series. Sure, it has its fair share of traipsing across the countryside, but there are saints and churches and random French and factories - and that's just background details she throws in to mess with your head. Monette also throws out your expectations. You think the wizard is the hero, but he goes insane and has to be dragged across the countryside by his half-brother, and once he gets better you think they're going to be all buddy-buddy, but the wizard is a complete douchebag in the second book, and the one character who is pure evil does not have any dastardly plots to take over the world. There are no epic battles. Felix and Mildmay have enough on their hands just trying to save themselves, without saving the world.
In the same vein Sarah Micklem's Firethorn has nothing whatsoever to do with traditional fantasy. She does all her own worldbuilding, the characters are mostly jerks, and even the ones that are a bit nicer are very not okay by modern standards - but it works in-universe. The magic is so subtly done you sometimes forget it is there - about all there is is that the main character can see in the dark - and the religion is so intricate I need to start a new sentence. There are two main types of religion in fantasy. The pantheon that doesn't do anything, and the annoyingly meddlesome pantheon. Firethorn has both. Seriously. The characters attribute events to divine intervention appropriately, but the reader can still shake her head and say "You silly pagan," if so desired.
And now for the counterexample.
Havemercy.
It is essentially Doctrine of Labyrinths fanfic. Sure, they made their own world, but they wanted to do esactly what Sarah Monette did. There's the gay wizard, but he doesn't go insane, and his love affair reads like a slash. There are the long-lost brothers, who have nothing at stake in their relationship. All the authors really made up was mechanical dragons, and that is not enough to support the overlarge cast of underdeveloped characters.
Now, what did they do wrong? They did not write fantasy. They wrote paradigm, only instead of Tolkien-Eddings, they just used Sarah Monette. But they completely missed the point. In copying the elements, they neglected to copy the style. Tolkien wrote travelogues, so he knew how to write traipsing across the country (your milage may vary). Monette knows everything there is about the Elizabethan era, and she reads nonfiction everything for fun. Micklem read army survival handbooks and memoirs - her whole first book is an army waiting for a war. Not one to save the world. And the war does not even start until the next book. The problem with Havemercy is that the authors did not know what they were writing; they just blindly followed what they though they should be writing. Take the gay character. Did any of your gay friends hook up because they were thrown into awkward physical situations by the writer? It sounds like an oxymoron, but fantasy needs to be realistic.
Sure, you make up a few rules, but humanity remains the same, and that is the strength of fantasy. Fiction deals mostly in the realm of what is. Yes, there is a certain amount of imagination in coming up with it, and you do actually face many of the same issues with worldbuilding, but in fantasy, you don't have to match the real world. It is more than just laziness; you can escape the usual explanations and arrive at deeper truths. Anything is possible. Anything.
Take advantage of it.
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