The Elders would like a word with you.
The Ritual is about to begin.
Something that has not happened in a thousand years is happening.
You are going to the City. There is only one City. It is only said with a capital C. No one needs to bother saying the name of the City. It is the City.
Certain members of the Council are displeased with your family’s recent actions.
A bard is providing occasional comic relief; no one hired or invited him and his method of earning a living is unclear.
The High Priest is not to be trusted.
Someone is eating an apple mockingly.
There is one body of water. It is called the Sea. The Great Sea, if you are feeling fancy.
You live in a region with no major exports, no centralized government, no banking system, a mysteriously maintained network of roads, and little to no job training for anyone who is not a farmer.
You have red hair. You wear it in a braid. Your father was a simple man, and you don’t remember much about him – he died when you were so young – but you remember his strong hands, as he fished or carpentered or whatever it was that he used to do with them.
You’re going to have to hurry, or you’re going to miss the Fair – and you never miss the Fair.
There is trouble at the Citadel.
Your full name has at least one apostrophe in it.
It is the first page, and you are already late for something. Your mother affectionately chides you as you gulp down a few spoonfuls of porridge; she will be dead by page forty-two.
There are two religions in your entire universe. One is a thinly veiled version of Islam. It is only practiced by villains. The other is “being a Viking.” You are a Viking.
There are new ways in the land that threaten the Old Way. Your grandmother secretly practices the Old Way, as do all of the people of the hills.
The real trouble began the day you arrived at court. Every last nobleman hides a viper in his smile. How you long for the purity of life in your village, which is currently on fire or something.
Tags: books, fantasy tropes, how to tell what novel you’re in
Related Posts
<3
Normal Words are Capitalized for No Reason.
You are taking The Road to The City to study The Way at The University, despite the fact that your parents were merely Wanderers in The Forest.
Very good.
I believe I played that in an Infocom game in the late 80s.
Your name has half a dozen more vowels in it than are strictly necessary.
Also true for being French
Or Dutch
Or Irish.
Or some combination thereof.
Alternately, half as many vowels as would be expected.
And they’re all ‘y’ (looking at you, GRRM).
Or those weird vowels that are joined together Olde English/Latin style.
Or, even stranger, umlauts. Nothing worse than a pointless umlaut to raise my hackles.
Over a Q or something.
That also might mean you’re French.
Ninaeve! Aeryn. Aerynne. Aethel. Aethelflaed. Moiraine. Siuan. Really, Robert Jordan was the worst about this. The worst.
This speaks to my soul
With your username, that makes sense.
Don’t you mean, “my Soul”?
You find yourself at an Inn, eating Stew.
Or a Tavern eating Tough Stew, if times are hard!
You order a flagon of ale to go with your stew.
How to Tell that You and Stew are in an Erotic High Fantasy Novel
….I would read this.
Stew, author and creator of the hit Broadway sensation Passing Strange? You animal!
Or broth. If on the road, anything with onions.
Diana Wynne Jones has a brilliant rant about why it’s always stew, which takes hours and hours to cook, and never omelets, which are easy but no one ever eats in Fantasy Land.
also why everyone wears cloaks and not sweaters.
If your hair isn’t red, it’s yellow, like the cornsilk your mother used to braid for your only doll before she died tragically in childbirth leaving you to be raised by your father who only ever wanted a son.
this is true regardless of what colour the rest of you may be, even if you are green all over.
and your doll has no face
This reminds me of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (http://www.amazon.com/The-Tough-Guide-Fantasyland-Essential/dp/0142407224) by Diana Wynne Jones in the best way. Thank you, Mallory.
And of course, Dark Lord of Derkholm as well, which are both excellent.
love that book.
I just re-read that a few weeks ago and it is still SO GOOD. (Have you read the sequel, Year of the Griffin? It’s a nice spin on the whole wizard-school narrative.)
YES!! also I am thinking of changing my name to Griffin
And your last name to McElroy? Because I’d be into that.
That is just what I came down here to say!! SNAP!
me too!
Thank you, I was trying to remember this book.
Such a brilliant book. I think about the pollinating horses all the time.
Fucking gratuitous apostrophes! They mean things, authors, they’re not fucking confetti. How am I meant to know how to pronounce the preposterous names when it’s never indicated whether it’s meant to be elision or glottal stop or an unusual phoneme or whatever, gah. (The very occasional novel that features a Foreign character who charmingly/humorously mispronounces things, thus indicating what in particular is the deal with the ‘-s and the z-s and so forth, is a delight to mine eyes and a soothing balm to my pedantry).
I think i may love you.
Let us make a wedding registry composed principally of really sturdy bookshelves, because goodness knows no-one ever told a roaring fantasy story in fewer than 600 pages.
in your honor, I am renaming the next gratuitous apostrophe characters I meet as “fucking gratuitous A” “fucking gratuitous B” etc.
Ugh, the linguistic pedantry gets me every time, too! Really, Robert Jordan? You want me to believe that every single person in all the dozen nations of this world speaks the same language, even the ones who have been living completely isolated on the other side of the ocean for over a thousand years? That the most variation we get is “Oh, these people don’t really properly conjugate their verbs,” or “These people speak in a slurring sort of accent that’s a little hard to understand.” REALLY?
And yet that one language has somehow changed consistently over the last 1000 years or whatever, such that no one really understands the “old language” anymore (I’m only on book three, but yeah. Wasn’t the language different before the people sailed across the ocean? And now they magically all speak the same language again/still)
What, like convergent evolution of languages?
It seems like the Old Tongue was dying out for good about the time of Hawkwing, and it didn’t turn into the New Tongue, so much as what had become the New Tongue kind of swept over the world. Which is also not how linguistics work, but he’s not exactly Tolkien, so there you have it.
Also, I am jealous of you about to read book 4 for the first time! It is my very favorite! I am doing my first full reread right now, and on a break between books 4 and 5. I did the whole series cover to cover the first time around, which was a mistake (for me, anyway).
I’ve been alternating one WoT novel with one shorter/different genre book, otherwise I just know I’ll get burnt out on the world and high fantasy in general.
I’m glad you liked the 4th book! The one review I saw (on Goodreads) was a dude complaining about all the misandry, which already endeared me to it a little. I’m excited!
If one’s definition of misandry is “men aren’t in charge of absolutely everything, and women are badasses too sometimes,” then I guess yeah. Chock full of misandry!
Just wait until you get to Ebou Dar in a couple books! A society where married women wear daggers around their necks (to keep their husbands in line), and any killing of a man by a woman is considered to be justified unless proven otherwise!
Oh man I love Ebou Dar. Also the Aiel are extremely badass. But I don’t know how you could pull misandry out of “one guy is totally going to save the whole world because he is intrisically good, and so are these two other guys, and also there are some ladies who want to bang them all the time”
ugh this +9000
the gender stereotypes in those books seriously get me down, which is probably a big part of why i never finished them. also the plot only develops like once every 5 books, and each book is as thick as the motherfucking OED.
and also, like, the plot. is endless. and convoluted. and so many cheap cliffhangers that they stopped being at all effective. like so:
book 1: cool cool, i like it, neat worldbuilding
book 2: okay whatever i’ll keep going
book 3: oh something might be about to happen!
book 4: maybe now it will happen
book 5: i guess stuff is sort of happening
book 6: so….tired…. [takes a break for a year, has to reread books 5 & 6 to find the thread again]
book 7: jfc stop describing ragtag armies the same way & why is everyone so fucking predictable all the time, also why aren’t min and moiraine the main characters, or even mat, mat would be fine too, ANYONE BUT RAND
book 8: okay…OH FUCK FINALLY A THING HAPPENED! IN THE LAST CHAPTER BUT STILL
book 9: relying on momentum from book 8
book 10: read half
book 11: oh i guess i should finish book 10
book ?: idk at some point he died and i was really pissed off
YESSSESDDDSSDSDSSSSSS
bless you, robert jordan. you were (and in some ways, still are) the bane of my existence. FOR SO MANY REASONS.
“Jeez…lot of glottal stops in this language…”
I always assume glottal stop, or ejective if it’s after a plosive. It makes it more fun.
Also this brings up for me how sad I am about Khaleesi and the fact that people are naming their daughters that now. Not because I think there’s anything wrong with innovative names, but because I wish he had just spelled it “Kalisi” since that’s how people say it. (I think that’s how they say it on the show, too, right?)
True, but nothing in that series is spelled sensibly (cf Cersei, Aeron, etc -at least there’s only so much he can do to Jon). I choose instead to take issue with these kids being named after a title, when Daenerys might be a pain to spell but at least can be shortened to normal-passing Dany. How can Khaleesi be shortened? I guess people do occasionally get named Queenie irl, though.
Jon = Chaun?
Oh god, what have I done? You can burn me now.
ETA: I’m now thinking of reading “Aeron” as “ay-e-ron” ala Key & Peele’s “A-a-ron.”
Oh god, now all I want in life is for Key & Peele to do a sketch where the substitute teacher reads a chapter of GAME OF THRONES to the class.
I will pronounce “Margaery” as “Marjorie” over my dead body. That’s just not how letters work.
I always thought of it as “Marg-rhymes with-blargh airy.”
I would argue that is correct! Although I’m also willing to accept “Marge-airy, “Marzh-airy,” and similar soft-g variants. But a LOT of names in ASoIaF/GoT have that “ae” in ’em, and all the rest of them appear to be pronounced as a long a, so I absolutely will not budge on the “airy” part.
Kal/Cal, Lease (well probably not spelled like that but that would be the sound), Haley maybe?
I dont speak english as a first language (its my third, actually) and pronounce weird names according to whatever sounds best. Jon is a common enough Swedish name and its pronounced as Joon (with the “oo” in boot and a flat “j” sound instead of the english “dj”). Cercei became Kersay. The show just messes with my head!
Duke
Queen
Earl
This is a legit thing people do in the real world.
>”I guess people do occasionally get named Queenie irl, though.”
The MOST FUN is pronouncing names with ejectives that you’re preeeetty sure the author did not intend to have ejectives in them. Makes silly naming systems much more interesting.
I like to assume they’re clicks, like in Xhosa.
Xhosa clicks are ‘q’, ‘x’ and ‘c’. What you’re looking for is Khoi or San (‘bushmen’) languages.
YES.
Things that will now make me put down a fantasy novel, because I am old and jaded and can drink instead:
1) Gratuitous apostrophes.
2) Renaming a random normal hot beverage Because Fantasy. I will allow it from Robin McKinley, because it was the eighties and everyone and their dog wasn’t doing that yet, but these days? IT IS FUCKING COFFEE AND YOU CAN GO TO HELL.
I once picked up a book, got two pages in, saw someone refer to “ko’koa” and SO MUCH NO.
DWJ was also mocking the totally-not-coffee-you-guys thing that back in the 80’s! (The short story is “Nad and Dan and Quaffy” and it is a thing of beauty.)
The last time I read that short story, I became convinced that she was, at least partly, making fun of C.J. Cherryh…
Totally, and also I think the Chanur books. Also when I first read it I laughed so hard coffee came out my nose.
Is THAT what malak is?? I wondered a lot when I first read The Hero and the Crown as a ten-year-old (and was also therefore oblivious to the fact that Aerin and Luthe had sex).
WELL kind of but she specifically says Harry likes it better than coffee. I always liked to think it was cocoa. What else do the scary tough nomad warriors drink?
Yeah, it’s the Fantasy Hot Breakfast Beverage–I’d have gone with cocoa except Hero and the Crown has Aerin thinking that “malak was supposed to bite” or similar, and also putting milk in.
I think there was this habit, in the sixties-through-eighties, of inventing The Beverage That Smells Like Coffee But Isn’t Actually Vile When You Drink It,.
And then we invented vanilla lattes and didn’t need that any more.
Klah!
There is a recipe for klah in the illustrated whatever of Pern. I was so so excited to try it, and so so disappointed when it tasted bitter and vile.
One of the highlights of Neal Stephenson’s Reamde was the scene where he goes off on his story writer for inserting random apostrophes in the names of the locations and characters in T’Rain.
As if he’s any better.
I assumed the apostrophes and accent marks are silent and only placed there to remind you that he’s in a band and doesn’t play bass. Gratuitous Umlauts indicate a metal band. Maybe apostrophes indicate alternative fusion.
something something coming of age, something something ancient relics of a strangely familiar civilization
#ToughGuidetoFantasyland
Co-Toasts, I miss Diana Wynne Jones so much, but at least we have Mallory!
Augh yes. I have never been more upset by an author’s death. She wrote so many amazing books, but of course I want MORE. You can never have enough DWJ.
There’s a lot of Prophecies. Or just one Prophecy but it is a doozy. Also capitalized! People either shout or whisper about it A LOT.
That which was written on the scrolls/tablets/walls of the lost tomb is becoming increasingly accurate.
Is it amazing how everyone knows the Prophecy perfectly? It’s like prophecies are the exception to games of Telephone.
“Well I never saw the scroll myself but my father’s father saw it, and he told my father and my father told me, so I know that one day the Blue Dog will rise over the tiny cornflakes and return our mittens to lemon trees”.
I can’t believe the Prophecy of the purple Monkey Dishwasher could be true.
And how everyone who translates it comes up with the exact same wording.
But… THE PROPHECY
basically everyone is balem abrasax.
or: eddie redmayne understands high fantasy, and portrayed balem abrasax as the distilled essence of every high fantasy novel ever. 100 oscars, and my firstborn.
No one believes you that the [long-extinct evil creatures] have returned, until it is almost too late.
Alternately: same, but with good dragons.
AHHHHHHHHHHHH SHOUT OUT!
We have dsmissed those claims.
“You live in a region with no major exports, no centralized government, no banking system, a mysteriously maintained network of roads, and little to no job training for anyone who is not a farmer.”
I’m no economist, but man, the economic implausbility of SO MANY fantasy novels, even “gritty realist ones” like A Song of Ice & Fire and Perdido Street Station, drives me nuts.
This was one of my major problems with Frozen. I couldn’t get past the implausibility of a minor port principality with no standing army and no industry or commerce, led by an underage woman who is never seen in public, not getting taken over militarily within the first year.
Not to mention their primary export is ice, and then they shit themselves when things get icy.
My main problem with FROZEN is that Elsa’s powers include the ability to INSTANTLY CREATE SENTIENT LIFE FROM NOTHING. Sentient life that is able to speak and have a rather vast well of knowledge of the world despite never encountering another speaking being. She is basically a god, nay God Herself, and yet NOBODY really reacts much to this. No, they freak out because she… makes it snow in Norway.
I HAVE A LOT OF PROBLEMS WITH FROZEN. I mean. Never before have I encountered a Disney movie where I couldn’t suspend my disbelief at all. I spent the whole movie concerned for the reindeer dude’s mental state because usually the movies give the animal companion anthropomorphic characteristics to convey their sentience, and in this it really was This Dude Is Doing The Voice For His Reindeer.
AND DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THE TROLLS WHAT WHO WHY
Same here! I mean, I really wanted to like it, but so many things kept taking me out of the story. Like, why didn’t Anna take five minutes to run back into the Castle and get some of her winter clothing before pursuing Elsa into the mountains? She’s Scandinavian. Scandinavians do not mess around with winter.
I can (maybe) explain the lack of coat! Being Canadian, especially around the first cold snap, I maaay develop some megalomania about the cold.
“Pfft, -10, who needs a jacket? I AM CANADIAN AND THE COLD SHALL OBEY ME!!! oh god ive made a terrible mistake its so cold i hate cold i will die in the prairie storm”
I can see Anna having a similar thought process. It’s not smart – but it happens.
Same in Sweden. I’ve more then once chased escaped horses trough the snow at -20c in nothing but my PJ’s and flip-flops only to catch the bugger and realize that I’m 5 km removed from the nearest place with central heating. It would have been so much worse if she had stopped moving. Rule nr 1 in cold places is never to stop moving. But really, people in cold countries are idiots. Particulary when living remote enough to walk 5 km outdoors in pj’s and only have the elks laugh at you.
I think she hadn’t spent much time outdoors, ever, since the whole thing where her parents decided to close off the castle to hide her sister.
I mean, she thought riding bikes around the halls was a reasonable activity.
Not to mention that bike stunt Anna was pulling was WAY more dangerous than when she played in the ice and snow with Elsa!
Surely that’s because the surrounding principalities also have no standing army and are ruled by, e.g. a princess asleep in a thorn-surrounded castle, a wild animal locked in a deserted castle in the forest, etc.
Or too busy gettin’ bizzay (I’m so sorry) and having what, fourteen kids or however many siblings the Mean Prince had and probably dying in childbirth.
Oh, thank you for this. I mean, I’m aware of the futility of getting hung up on the plausibility of Disney plots, but I just could not deal with this one. What kind of king and queen sail away on the same boat with absolutely no provision for who will be in charge if (when) they sink and die? Why couldn’t they explain SOMETHING to the younger sister about why her older sister was locked away? If wearing gloves helped her control the magic, why couldn’t she just…always wear gloves, instead of growing up locked away in a room alone?
Man, I think I have more problems with this story than with Snowpiercer.
The animation was beautiful, though.
Thank god, my people, etc.
I had a really hard time with Frozen as well, although I like how it’s ultimately a story about sisterly love.
I thought the evil prince was possibly the best royal available for the rulin’ job. It’s cold? Organize soup and blankets for everyone! Way more governmental competence than anyone else shows.
If he had just sniffled over Anna instead of gloating while she was dying, he’d have had it all.
Also they cut ties with their primary trade partner at the end of the movie, which seems unwise, even if said trade partner is being awful.
I assumed from the whole coronation thing that there must have been a regent, but he or she definitely seems to have been incompetent, what with handing things over to Elsa without having prepared Elsa at all, and not sticking around to ensure a smooth transition.
And then there’s Naboo.
This may sound sarcastic but I swear it’s not. I would actually really like to hear about the economic implausibility of Game of Thrones. It sounds like it would be interesting.
There are a lot of fascinating essays on economics on Game of Thrones. I think the general consensus is that Martin made the world a little too big for the scale of what’s actually going on.
Thank goodness for Tumblr nerds.
MedievalPoC covered this on her tumblr, but basically, Westeros is just too damn violent. Thirty Years’ War-levels of war and destruction occur regularly. The Riverlands, which is one of the major agricultural and mercantile regions, is decimated once every few decades, by war, ironborn raids, etc. Coupled with years-long winters that afflict the continent, it’s virtually impossible to imagine Westeros supporting the kind of civilization it does.
I also think Western Essos, which is roughly the size of Asia, is ridiculous in that its polities consist solely of 13 city-states (9 Free Cities, Qarth, and the 3 Slavers Bay cities).
OMG my least favorite thing is people who defend the levels of rape/violence in GoT with “historicity!”
NO IT IS A FANTASY WORLD IT IS NOT HISTORICAL AND EVEN IF IT WERE IT’S UNREALISTIC
gnashes teeth
blames Tolkien
Look at the size of the cities and the standing armies, and the kinds of things they’re building: massive stone walls, palaces and mansions, highly specialized workers. Think of how large an army would need to be to survive the kind of losses mentioned without that being remembered as the time all but one squad died.
Start thinking about how much food those people eat every day, and how you’d get that food to a city – even horses need to eat and wagon trails would quickly exhaust everything nearby, roads require maintenance and guards, etc.
Consider that this was an often hungry business in real history until the New World potato gave a reliable calorie source and fertilizer became common.
Now they’re supposed to do all of that and somehow stockpile for a massive winter? Even in peacetime that’s unrealistic — although perhaps not as much as everyone not living in enough terror of winter to make peace and cooperate.
Max Gladstone does really interesting stuff with the economy in his fantasy novels.
Ugh I love him. Just finished the second Craft book, need to read the third.
Full Fathom Five is just as good as you’re expecting. Really great series. I would like another appearance by Tara Abernathy though 🙂
Personally, I’m hoping Morally Ambiguous Mal comes back.
Red King Consolidated!
I just finished books 2 and 3. Most people seemed to prefer 3, but I really like 2.
Someone on Tumblr did a really elaborate analysis of Casterly Rock and Lannister wealth, and it’s pretty amazing.
The only problem with all that gold is the same problem the Spanish discovered when they brought back gold and silver from the New World: inflation. If you flood your market with new currency, you cause prices to go up because your currency is worth less (there is more of it). So the Lannisters can have all the golds, but spending them might cause economic problems already perpetuated by endless warfare. If there are no goods, no amount of gold in the world will help you, aka the Thorin Oakenshield Conundrum.
Not to mention the ecology! Your climate undergoes seasonal change at random for long periods of monoclimates of different types, but that doesn’t effect agriculture or food-culture or the structure of the “year” at all.
Seriously, you would think the plants would have evolved to, like, freak out and grow like gangbusters during the height of summer and turn the whole world into a jungle, and humans wouldn’t be able to bushwhack the creepers and vines back from their walls and palaces fast enough. Then they’d die back to the ground and their roots would go dormant whenever the temperature dropped below freezing.
Also, part of the reason we have most of our weather is not only because of the Earth’s rotation but specifically because of that axial tilt thing that causes different parts of the planet to be warm at different times, creating temperature/pressure gradients and pushing weather cells around to enable rain. If that’s *not* how Westeros works, because obviously it can’t be or their seasons would be periodic, how do they not have the canonical 0°-tilt biome strips (a strip of mild wet forests around the equator, a strip of bone-dry deserts at about Mediterranean latitude, a strip of cool wet-but-not-very grasslands and forests above that, and poles with fields and flowers that never get much snow because it’s constantly springtime)?
These are the things I ask myself about worlds where seasons apparently defy physics. I really wish we knew how seasons worked in Fantasyland.
In *utterly* Fantasyland, of course, the seasons depend on the mood the Faerie Queen or equivalent is in. I’m good with that. Otherwise, what you said.
This particular issue was what halted me, and my daughter! I mean, axial tilt is one thing, lack of axial tilt is another, and no rotation At All is yet another, and this is none of those. Fuck that.
I’ve been thrown out of party/bar thing for drunkely ranting about this very thing. I’m a biologist, stuff like this hurts my soul. (Still read all of the books though. I’ve put up with worse”
Yeah, I mean, along these lines (almost) NO ONE IS EVER FARMING, even though 99% of the people should be farming! I suppose it’s possible that, in books, the characters are just uninterested in peasants and so they never come up, but you’d think in movie or TV versions they’d walk by a farm from time to time!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAaWvVFERVA
And NO ONE IS EVER SPINNING. Where is the thread in their clothes, their sails, their forbidding ancient tapestries, their bandages from all their freaking war injuries coming from? Every woman should have a spindle! Especially in the brothels, HBO I am looking at you, that’s what they did in the day if you look at ancient Greek pottery….
That would be a sensible way to pass the time!
I have to admit this is part of why I love Elizabeth Scarborough’s hearthwitch Maggie Brown. Magic based on domestic skills! Neat!
No one is ever mending, sewing, weaving, knitting, or doing any sort of needlework ever unless they are a noblewoman and embroidering. They are only embroidering to show how useless they are, like the needlework they are doing. Never mind that embroidery reinforces areas of high-wear on a garment which is why you always see embroidery along the cuffs of shirts and the neckline or yoke of dresses.
This also bugs me in post-apocalyptic shows. How/where do you get your clothes Walking Dead people? There’s only so many Walmarts to raid.
I had absolutely no idea that’s why embroidery is where it is on clothing! I thought it was just near the parts we’re likely to look at – other people’s faces and hands.
THANK YOU. This is everything the pedantic dressmaker and general needle-nut in me has ever questioned. EMBROIDERY MATTERS PEOPLE. I am literally living for the day I see a post-apocalyptic drama with a character constantly darning socks and trying to patch together new clothes from rags (and not in a steam-punk ridiculously complicated construction way either – I mean who has time to sew rag corsets with zombies at your back?). I think the lack of consideration into realistic costume actually annoys me more than the magic mascara that stays perfect regardless of running, emotional trauma and more running.
In short – why does no-one get this right, its SO easy!
At least Prydain explicitly had people spinning, farming, potting, and … upcycling.
I am not a big fan of lots of explicit violence, so Game of Thrones is not for me, but each time I read about how frequent the warfare is on the show or in the books, and how a number of people are running around killing peasants for the hell of it, I’m like “how the fuck are you eating if you keep killing all your farmers, dipshits?”
Honestly, by this point in time the White Walkers are completely irrelevant to Westeros’ survival (or lack thereof.) Their winter lasts for years, and they’ve spent their entire harvest season pillaging and murdering all the farmers. The Walkers are gonna arrive in the capital city (very slowly) to find everybody already dead of starvation and exposure.
WHAT IF: it was the White Walkers who built The Wall to keep the violent, arsehole humans OUT of the North and not the other way round and humans just spun the story that they built it out of sour grapes? This could be the next Wicked…
What with all the horrible stuff that’s happened in Westeros so far, more and more fans are starting to side with the White Walkers. I like this theory.
YEP.
Economics sticklers might enjoy this article on plausible medieval demographics, based partly on 13th French tax rolls. There’s an accompanying generator that will intake a few parameters from your fantasy kingdom (population, area, agricultural production) and return a preposterously exact array of stats on land use, number of universities, number of fowl and “meat animals,” etc. It will also generate a few cities and let you know how many hay merchants they can support.
The Perdido books are especially fun since they’re specifically about early industrialization and the social upheavals thereof but everyone has always lived in this massive hyperdense city-state and aside from those rebels who used to be rail line engineers and I think some instantly-killed mooks who used to be longshoremen everyone’s job is something like ‘independently wealthy science dabbler’ or ‘publishes a zine’ or ‘crimes (miscellaneous)’
YEP. I’m also not sure how New Crobuzon reached early industrialization-levels of technology when there are only like five other known polities on the planet and each of those is some sort backwards nightmare city-state.
Two thousand years of feudal cockroach-tree farming on the manworm terrorgoat chaos hellscape
laughed at that, but then remembered the Chinese road system, which was fantastically built and maintained for a long period, and then for like a thousand years was basically unmaintained, but still usable due to features of its construction
wait, wasn’t part of it built for two-and-four wheeled vehicles and then abandoned by the center polity and only *one* lane of the original maintained by the locals, who used center-wheel barrows which are incredibly efficient? AsyouknowBob given your name?
Your recurring dream becomes more and more vivid with each passing night. You find a piece of the dream under a leaf.
you have an unusual relationship to a natural source of power, say the wind or the ocean maybe, that you’ve had since you were a child. you are barely just not a child and this power has been seen as bad and dangerous, but now maybe….
Your name could involve “e”s and “i”s but instead it includes some “y”s in their place.
So, Welsh?
I can neither confirm nor deny this.
In the reality (the one we live in) where Welsh is not a real language, but one where you can make up spelling conventions at will.
This is enough to make me not read a book.
You discover the True Name of a thing and thus have power over it.
All the leather is boiled.
And this, buttery and/or supple
Everyone wears medieval clothing, but with pants.
where are the hose
where are they
what did people make hose out of. all the hose I know are petroleum by-product
We actually don’t know, although historians who study Medieval clothing have guesses. They were most likely very difficult to make, so only people on the well-to-do or wealthy end of the spectrum wore them; lower classes would either just have gone bare-legged between their tunics and their socks, or worn scraps of cloth wrapped around their legs and cross-gartered (i.e. tied with laces from top to bottom).
Hosen could have been made of wool, which naturally has a bit of stretch, but they would not have been as elastic as modern pantyhose – they would have been carefully tailored to fit the person they were designed to be worn by almost perfectly. During certain centuries they may also have been lined with linen to reduce scratchiness.
Source: http://www.greydragon.org/library/underwear3.html
It’s also not entirely unreasonable to portray historical European-esque people wearing trousers, although they wouldn’t have looked like modern pants; in the northern parts of Europe they were more often tied off at the cuffs or even had attached feet, worn in place of socks. Later on people started wearing two pairs of trousers, the bottom pair referred to as “drawers” and the upper pair referred to as “breeches,” and that’s where our pants vs. underwear distinction comes from.
I’ve been re-reading a lot of David and Leigh Eddings lately.
Perpetrates pretty much all of these.
I loved those books! But they are basically Epic High Fantasy in exactly this way.
I loved (loved them VERY much) them when I was about 12 and then I went away and read other things for some years and came back and thought it would be fun to re-read them. It was not, since they were awful in every possible way.
I loved them when I was 12 too and have not wanted to revisit them for fear that I’ll hate them now.
What I love most about them is that you can pick up any Eddings book and know exactly what you’re going to get.
There will be a sarcastic older woman who is very maternal and stunningly beautiful.
There will be an old man who is a bit of a rogue but good at heart.
There will be a spoiled young woman with red or black hair. She will have a firey temper and stamp her feet.
There will be a farm boy with a good heart.
There will be a redeemed/’good’ thief. He will probably have a pointy noise.
There will be a repressed religious man who comes around to love WITH
A witchy/sexually open woman/ex slave – basically anyone who doesn’t fit with the weird ideas of female sexual purity that the books are full of
There will be magic, which will have rules, yet even so all major conflicts will be solved with it.
There will be Good Races and Evil Races.
Every book will have essentially the same plot.
My favourite is actually The Redemption of Althalus. It’s basically Pure Eddings.
I ended up liking the Elenium/Tamuli better than the Belgariad/Malloreon. It was more… condensed. And funnier.
Fun fact: there is a joke in the Belgariad or Malloreon that is repeated word for word in the Elenium and I wish I could remember it.
“If this gets any more cloying, I’ll vomit” or words to that effect.
I don’t think that’s the one I’m thinking of! They’re basically the same books though, so w/e.
Oh my god, there’s more than one recycled joke?? I don’t know why I am so surprised, because you’re right. They are the same books.
“Did you want to do this?…Then did you want to shut up and let me do it?” is definitely uttered by both Sparhawk and Garion. I’m sure there are others, but that’s the one that leapt immediately to mind.
My favorite joke in the entirety of the Belgariad/Mallorean was
Belgarath: What happened to you?
Garion: I hit my head.
Belgarath: I thought we all agreed you weren’t going to do that anymore.
he put out a guide for writing high fantasy many years ago that my library at high school had in stock (the belgarian and mallorean were a huge thing at my high school among us dorks), and basically yeah – the dude didn’t just have a loose system he had a fucking precision formula. he had figured out how to make it rain with fiction, boiled that first success down to a science and then replicated it indefinitely.
I remember reading that and getting SO MAD. Here I was, a bright tween, throwing away the prime of my life enjoying his books out of the goodness of my heart when in actual fact he was just cravenly following a formula and didn’t give a damn about what he was creating. And by he I mean his wife. That was really the beginning of the end for me as a fantasy fan. (In retrospect, I am happy that happened for me around 14 instead of dragging it out too much longer.)
There will be a magic rock/stone/gem which the protagonist has an oddly personal relationship. It will be all powerful yet someone not able to solve any of the problem which face said protagonist. For example; gruel.
David Eddings is also a big fan of ‘they galloped and galloped and galloped’ across the land, over and over and over again. If he cut out all the galloping of his questing heroes, he’d get any trilogy done in one slim volume.
the elves are a tragic people who live forever, which is why it is often inexplicable why they are tragic.
They are also total dicks about *everything*
it’s because they’re actually vampires
Wait like 60% of these apply to living in Connecticut. What does this mean?
I’d always suspected Connecticut was imaginary
That silent pointless second ‘c’ has always made me suspicious.
That it’s time to move to The City, sirrah.
I live in Connecticut and even I can’t tell you!!!
you should actually be living in Massachusetts?
You are in The City now, there is a pang of longing for the forest you used to spend so much time in.
You are in a dress. At home you never wore dresses because they were impractical. Someone comments that you are beautiful. You have never heard this before.
Also, you’re a guy. 😛
(THIS IS IT. This is the “How to tell if you are in…” I have been waiting for.)
You are the Heir. You must be crowned to put an end to the corruption in the land, save the crops from dying, and make the roads safe again. Everyone is sure you can do this, despite the fact that you have been raised as a farmboy.
You are not sure you can do this, but it turns out everyone else was right, and this ruling thing is pretty easy once you take back the throne from the Wrongful Ruler who is probably your uncle.
Also, the system of government in the country where you live is totally OK with sticking random 16-year-old yokels on the throne.
This is literally the plot of Queen of The Tearling, except she also has two mysterious jewels that she has had for as long as she can remember.
Guess what book I’m currently halfway through?
I rolled my eyes through 93% of that book and then had an absolute temper tantrum when I realized the rest of the series is not out yet.
I wanted so hard to like Queen of the Tearling (my name is Kelsea! I never get nice things!) but just couldn’t. Why has the future reverted to feudalism? Why is this girl, whose guardians know she will be queen, completely unaware of any sort of current event, and has never read anything other than Harry Potter? Why can she always think of the correct rousing thing to say when faced with danger, when the rest of the time she meebles at the feet of men? Ugh. Anyway, since I never get nice things, I am with this series for the long haul.
Just another reason I <3 Terry Pratchett. Wyrd Sisters will forever be one of my favorite books. Everyone knows he’s the king! He’s kingly! And he’s got this birthmark!
I really loved The Goblin Emperor, but yes.
I actually felt that was undermined -everyone thought he couldn’t do it, it was indeed pretty difficult, and the skills he did already have were explained (being used to coping with awful people). I just liked the departure from “everyone loves the king because he’s kingly and wise and good at swords, which is what makes a good king.” (Mind you, I may be being blinded by the adorableness, so criticise away!)
Agreed- it’s also shown that he gets better at it as he goes along because he makes friends who are way more competent than he is and help teach him how to do things.
Your father is the only honest man left in the Realm. Your father dies to protect his family. There is no honesty anywhere anymore.
Oh God I wrote this one constantly in my teens.
Your father is played by Sean Bean in the movie/tv addaption.
People always think of your society as quasi-Medieval when it’s quite clear from the level of [magi-]technology and social organization on display that you’re just Early Modern with wizards and stuff instead of gunpowder.
Speaking of quasi-Medieval, it struck me as really very weird that the costume design for Into the Woods the film (which misses the point so many times on so many things oh MY GOD) went with quasi-Renaissance (except for Little Red Ridinghood, who wears a very 19th/20th-century dress with a smocked bodice and short puffed sleeves that you could probably buy a version of in any given kids’ clothing store, and Jack who is basically just wearing a dirty sweater) when the original stage production is more like the mid-1800s.
IDK it was weird.
Meanwhile, the ingredients for Dark Fantasy:
– Elves
– Dwarves
– People saying “fuck”
– Ambiguous morality
– Rapists
There are rapists in all fantasy novels. All of them. Every last goddamn one.
To the extent that, when rape is NOT present in a fantasy novel or game, I’ve seen people say “Where’s the rape? This is unrealistic!”
(Thanks Game of Thrones.)
Seanan McGuire (who’s urban fantasy) had a post about how she has been asked when her main characters are finally going to get raped. Her reply is absolutely never because these are her worlds, and if she can have fairies working at Safeway, or boogeymen owning nightclubs, she can imagine a world without sexual assault. http://seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com/470626.html
That was an excellent post. (I’ve really gotta read her books at some point, since I’ve enjoyed her writing on gender in SF/F so much.) Even with my joking above, it’s amazing how much rape really has become just an expected part of genre fantasy fiction.
I saw a similar thing on one of the shitty Kotaku reader blogs a little while back. In a post which got way more (positive, sigh) attention that it should have, some dude talked about how sad it was that Dragon Age: Inquisition, compared to the first game in the series, was no longer “Dark Fantasy.” The proof of this? The fact that it dealt with war and didn’t deal with the (“inevitable”) mass rape, and that black people suddenly existed in the world.
Omg there are corpses EVERYWHERE in DA:I and like half the side-quests deal with going to find someone for someone else and then alerting the second person that the first one is dead, finding notes on dead people, or laying flowers on the graves of dead people. What even with these people.
I sent this to a friend of mine. for whom this issue is near and dear to her heart. Here is her response:
I like to keep a list of a quality fantasy books without rape scenes. The top 7 of the list below probably qualify as epic fantasy, while rest are other types of fantasy:
The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison
Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay
Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson
Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss (didn’t read the later ones- maybe it appears there)
A Shadow in Summer, by Daniel Abraham
Daughter of the Empire, by Raymond Feist and Janny Wurts (spousal abuse, but not gratuitous)
First Truth, Dawn Cook
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
Anything by Patricia McKillip
The Lies of Locke Lamora, Scott Lynch
Child of Fire, Harry Connolly (urban fantasy)
Anything from A Clockwork Century by Cherie Priest (steampunk)
Anything by Gail Carriger, starting with Souless (mannerpunk)
Anything from the Taltos series by Stephen Brust (heists)
YA fantasy is often a good alternative, too, since it’s not as violent, although there are some noteworthy exceptions (Rachel Caine, I’m looking at you!). Holly Black is a good one.
I thiiiiiiink Bujold’s Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls don’t have rape, either? Like, I’m 95% sure?
Also: a useful list, this! Thanks!
Alas, we find out that Royina Sara slept with Martou dy Jironel under duress and that Dondo dy Jironel raped her repeatedly.
DAMN IT. That’s right.
I don’t think remember anyone being raped in “Lord of the Rings”. On the other hand, I came away with the impression that Middle Earth somehow got by without sex.
We certainly never saw it. I think Arwen got pregnant by immaculate conception.
There is no rape scene that I can remember in the second Patrick Rothfuss book, but it does happen off screen and the aftermath is somewhat dealt with, so not the best book to avoid the subject.
Tamora Pierce’s novels have very little rape, and when it has happened it’s been off-screen.
Pretty sure there’s no rape in the Attolia books, and realistic court machinations to boot
You have a pair of ruby slippers I mean a magic stone that will fix Goddamned Everything but you’re too dumb to figure out how to use it until all hope is lost.
See also, eagles.
Evil monarch is evil because evil. Internal motivation is for peasants.
“Internal motivation is for peasants.” Yes. Also, very Dowager Countess-esque.
“What is a weekend? Internal motivation is for peasants.”
“You are going to the City. There is only one City. It is only said with a capital C. No one needs to bother saying the name of the City. It is the City.”
Looks like everyone in the Greater New York Region is one step away from accompanying a ringbearer.
Also the entire population of Minnesota outside the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area. “Uff da, gotta go down to The Cities this weekend.” You can hear the capitalization.
Baltimore does this too, but it’s because Baltimore City is a very different place [they’re actually separate political entities, in addition to the joys of White Flight and everything else] than Baltimore County.
[Lest we forget, Baltimore County is also home to the ethereal and otherworldly Towson, MD, which has been discussed on the Toast before.]
This is how I explain to people in UK and Ireland where I grew up “Not _in_ the city, but close enough that I refer to it as “the city” and assume you know which one I mean.”
You don’t need to explain that to anyone in Norfolk. ‘The City’ is Norwich.
Bay area too.
You’re all wrong. Only New York is in danger because only New York is the Only City. everything else is just rather large townships, ish.
You are terrible at stitching/embroidery and thus, a disappointing daughter.
All I’m missing is the causality!
Oh my gods this is beautiful.
There are multiple major species of humanoid creatures, such as elves, dwarves, and hobbits. There are at most two black people.
And they’re the Bad Guys.
Well, or else they’re the Magical Wise Ones. With skin like polished ebony.
Are their eyes also chocolate orbs, or is that only in bad fanfiction?
Yes! But then they are almost always described in food terms anyway.
One of them might be the bodyguard to a charismatic white good guy. He is tall, has his muscles described in extended detail, and effectively mute. He only talks once in the entire novel, giving necessary encouragement/information/both to the (white) hero.
When there are anyone resembling East Asians, their skin is like ivory, their eyes are like almonds and they are so inscrutable. How inscrutable? I’ve never been able to figure it out, that’s how.
Don’t forget black hair like silk. LIKE SILK. BECAUSE SILK COMES FROM CHINA, AS DO CHINESE PEOPLE
They are nomadic horsemen! Or perhaps merchants!
But not called Black people. They usually have some made up name for their entire race or are just Barbarians. There are never variations on color. There’s just White and Black with no shades of people in between.
Okay I made a comment account just to complain about this article. My complaint is that it did not continue until I got off work at 5 pm.
so i love this, OBVIOUSLY, but i also thought at first that it was “how to tell if you are high in a fantasy novel,” which i also really want to read.
The world is ending. You take a long drag off of the polished wooden pipe containing a thinly-veiled marijuana analogue and have another lemon cake.
You realize everything Elrond’s been saying for the last thirty minutes hasn’t made the slightest bit of sense.
Wait… Elrond’s been talking this whole time?
I would imagine being high would make Elrond make MORE sense.
“You are a hobbit. Or you’re Gandalf.”
Everything is blurry. You stumble from tavern to tavern and finally end up in a house of ill repute, with no idea how you got there, in a room with several half-naked members of your preferred gender. You realize how far you’ve come and how many things you’ve seen since the day you left home, and wistfully remember the cheerful farmer’s son/daughter you once kissed behind the barn on Festival Night.
Then you realize your magic amulet is no longer around your neck. It was all a trick! You grab your clothes and sword and race out of the room, knocking aside several sex workers and their sleazy clients on your way out the door.
You don’t have time to be high anymore, apparently. You have to find the man who gave you the herbs and stole your amulet before he makes it out of the city’s well-defined borders, which are probably gates guarded by the king’s soldiers.
You fear it’s too late.
Didn’t James Franco make this movie at one point? (I’m pretty sure it’s bad.)
oh, yeah, i think he did, but i didn’t see it because i heard it was bad. there’s also knights of badassdom, which i had high hopes for (pun semi-intended) because peter dinklage, but it too was bad.
I think the only people who could possibly do it well are Ilana and Abbi from Broad City.
omg yes
Being high in a fantasy novel would be pretty much the same as being an ordinary character in a fantasy game. “I’m in a City. I must fulfil the Prophesy. But first I must run run run, round in a circle. How do I control the direction in which I look. I am going to eat 12 apples, 4 raw potatoes and a loaf of bread. Let’s run to the horizon forever! Hey, a chicken!”
A group of Italian guys basically did this very thing. They trimmed the LOTR movies down to about 1/1.5 hour each and overdubbed them with their parody script. It became a story where the ring actually holds the power that allows people to get high, and that power needs to be released over the world (Gandalf is of course Ganjalf, Aragorn is Arabong and so on). It’s a hoot but of course most of it would be lost in translation! I also have to admit I’ve seen it so many times that when I watch the actual movies I tend to overlay the parodied lines over the real ones…
You are enjoying your simple life, but dream idly of distant lands. Around page thirty, nameless monsters attack you, because you are the chosen one for reasons that are never fully explained. You fight them off with a deus ex machina that arrives at the last second.
Aw, dang, you got to this one before I did!
Often in the form of a very attractive and very willing woman.
Or a mostly competent, highly attractive and very churlish man. (His short temper is a mask for his Deep Feelings he already has for the heroine)
The thing is, my interest is peaked and I now want to know the rest of the story.
Even though you dream of a more exciting life, the notion that you are anything more than the ordinary child of simple farmers is patently absurd.
…or is it?
I gotta say, I am more than a little sick of peasant farmers lying to their children about their true parentage. At this point I assume that every protagonist in any given epic arrived by a basket floating down the river, because of course they did.
without secret noble parentage how can we confer on the protagonist the merits of the aristocracy while still assuaging the reader as to the moral superiority of their working-class background thouuuuugggghhhh
Would that I had more than one like to give this comment.
It has to be a pretty crowded river by this point, tbh.
Your compatriots are Tyllyan, Mer’gwol, K;;;thanyerus, Golg, and William.
Haha William. My shackles raise at inconsistent linguistics. I’m sorry but Jacob and L’allaniana do NOT come from the same culture.
Isn’t L’allaniana the female alien in “Galay Quest?”
Golg has a thick West Country accent, and is most likely the comic relief/crude and outspoken character. William is from Yorkshire.
Thrill to exciting locales like:
-Farms village
-Road
-Big wall city
-Woods of Forest
-Stone underbottom
-Evil jail tower
-Sand
-Place with fire
Sequel will take yiou to
-Swammmmmp (briefly)
-Here, where people with ice powers live
Please consult Wiki for elaborate history of every.
Sand
Snorted fancy tea everywhere!
Yes! There’s only one desert and it’s always called the ” something something wastelands” . All rivers end just before reaching this “wasteland”.
Woods of Forest oh my god
“big wall city” omg dying
There are Elaborate and Magnificent Feasts, and they are often. No less than six descriptive words are used per food item.
Hi GRRM
Hi Brian Jacques.
Please do tropes of Science Fiction next. I’d die from glee.
Seconded!
There are new ways in the land that threaten the Old Way. Your grandmother secretly practices the Old Way, as do all of the people of the hills.
You are going to the City. There is only one City. It is only said with a capital C. No one needs to bother saying the name of the City. It is the City.
You’re going to have to hurry, or you’re going to miss the Fair – and you never miss the Fair.
Also signs that you’re in the Bay Area.
I want to stand in line for Blue Bottle at the Farmer’s Market with your comment and then maybe go to yoga with it.
“All the people of the hills” is surprisingly accurate for the Bay Area
You have a special relationship with a noble wild animal (a hawk, a horse, a big cat…). It saves your life at a vital juncture and its reward is to die horribly, yet poignantly. You are more upset at its death than at the deaths of any of your other bosom companions.
Also: DRAGONS.
PATHOS!
(Courtesy of Craig Shaw Gardner)
I was thinking Artax
The raccoon thing in the Dark Tower series.
At some point, you and your heretofore platonic traveling companion must huddle together for warmth in a shelter, possibly skin-to-skin because your clothes have become wet due to falling in a river/sudden and unseasonable precipitation. When the threat of hypothermia has passed, your relationship is no longer platonic.
Daine and Numair from the Wild Magic series by Tamora Pierce, and Rune and wotsisface in that Mercedes Lackey book. Aaaah.
Yes, but that trope goes back to book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid….
At least Virgil had the decency to attribute it to divine meddling.
All of these are spot on but somehow the apple is the MOST spot on.
You are definitely too small/young/female to pose any sort of threat to the Guy Who Used To Be Human But Is Now Missing Critical Elements of His Face And Is Therefore Clearly Evil.
Or so he thought.
Sucker.
In a similar manner, I highly recommend The Evil Overlord List. http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html (in early high school, nothing gave me more joy than parodies of high fantasy, to the point where I made a forum about them. It is taking a lot of self-restraint not to link to all of the parodies, but I couldn’t resist this one)
Your father keeps a sword in a locked trunk that he never let you open, until your 16/17/18th birthday.
Your father promises he will tell you everything once he returns from a trip, but then your town, your home, and your mother is destroyed by giant, human-eating humanoids.
…
Well, I guess no one ever said Attack on Titan was High Fantasy.. ^^;
Fry and Laurie had a good take on that theme: http://youtu.be/8U7GKdbiA2c
Somehow, this sword has not rust-welded itself to its scabbard.
[i]There are two religions in your entire universe. One is a thinly veiled version of Islam. It is only practiced by villains.[/i]
I SEE YOU THERE DAVID EDDINGS YOU ENDLESS SACK OF USED CONDOMS
Also C.S. Lewis, Sharon Shinn, etc….
But at least lewis had a female of that culture be one of the heroes.
I know this post is old by internet standards, but MY GOD “endless sack of used condoms” is glorious and I had to praise this insult.
Everyone else in your world is ok with not brushing their teeth/getting married for reasons other than true love/living in one place the entire time/etc but not you. You are different.
Anyone, ever, anywhere who grins wickedly is a dead giveaway you are in a high fantasy novel.
*quirks eyebrow*
Some of us with not-straightened teeth do that all the time. People interpret my smiles as a lot more threatening than they’re meant to be, as a result of expecting teeth to be even. In fantasy, if someone’s teeth remind you of a crocodile, they’re probably evil. In real life, though? It can just mean that they didn’t spend a fortune at the dentist.
I just started reading Rhapsody by Elizabeth Haydon and was wholly ready to embrace every one of these items, but then it threw me off course with MINORS HAVING EXTREMELY TENDER SEX. I was prepared for the island that sank into the sea, and the Brother, and the marriage lottery, but not for coitus between 13-year-olds.
Oh my god, those books uh, well, how to put this: those books have informed a lot of my sexual preferences, in good and bad ways.
Is it even possible to have extremely tender sex at 13? I mean, isn’t that the age at which kids are trying to figure out where to stick it?
You drink deeply from you goblet.
You quaff ale (or mead) from your drinking horn.
It is bought to you by a wench, not a waitress.
You are related to a High King through your mother’s side. Likely a rape. But you will rise to the occasion and prove your worth. The Evil will not see this coming.
You know how to read and use a sword, despite being raised in the woods.
How to Tel You Are in a High Fantasy Movie:
Despite having never used a sword before, and being small and physically weak, you are able to kill dozens of murderous creatures with swords bent on killing you.
Because your mother taught you in sekrit!!
Every single one of these are on point, but if you combined them all into a single novel I would still absolutely, positively read it.
“You are going to the City. There is only one City. It is only said with a capital C. No one needs to bother saying the name of the City. It is the City.” Welp, totally in a HF novel then, because that’s all Manhattan is ever truly referred to as—and there are no other cities.
You are forced by sudden disaster to leave your village, despite the fact that you have never before ventured farther than the edge of the nearby forest. You cannot go back until you have accomplished something of great significance.
You don’t know much about your ancestry, so you are in for a hell of a shock somewhere around page 350.
You find a mysterious object in a cave/well/glacier/tree/lake/ancient temple and decide to bring it with you, just because. It’s kind of neat, you think, but it’s not like it will ever come in handy, probably.
Your party includes a steadfast companion whom you have grown up alongside, who is basically like a sibling to you or maybe a close cousin. You definitely do not have sexual tension with this person, until you suddenly do, in a moment of great peril, and then you realize that you were in love all along.
Your diet includes plenty of porridge, ale, and skewers of meat roasted over a campfire, but no one has ever heard of salad. Or, oddly, sandwiches.
You have a horse. It was wild and slightly ill-tempered at first, but you have managed to break it to the saddle and now it is loyal to you alone. It is your best friend.
Your journeys take you to mysterious and foreign lands. You know these lands are truly mysterious and foreign when your noble hosts serve you entire dishes composed of nothing but oddly-colored fruits, spiced with flavors you never could have imagined.
“You don’t know much about your ancestry, so you are in for a hell of a shock somewhere around page 350.”
That made me laugh loudly enough to scare the cat.
If there wasn’t a horse, I would say that you were cribbing from Baldur’s Gate (with the appropriate Imogen mods) rather than a novel.
I played Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance about 12 years ago and enjoyed it, but that’s all I know of the franchise. (Um, I recall being a hot elf lady, using a morningstar, and destroying the shit out of some skeleton men, but that’s about it? It was excellent though.)
That would be Welsh. Welsh and Irish are in complementary distribution in this matter.
ETA: and this would be in response to mlitiagirl….
The Gods are angry, but not enough to actually do anything.
As a fantasy writer, I’m checking through my latest draft making sure I’ve done none of these…
I read a lot of these in junior high. 90% were in the form of Tamora Pierce novels.
No, no. You must do ALL of them. Then I will totally read your book and love it.
For those who like this sort of thing and don’t mind subtitles, I cannot recommend highly enough Dharam Veer (1977) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213611/?ref_=fn_al_t…. It’s … there are no words to describe the sublime absurdity of this movie.
A powerful and much older man who has fallen from grace agrees (reluctantly) to be your teacher.
Your best friend, of the opposite sex, having a mysterious feeling that you’ll Change if you go to the City, secretly follows you to see that nothing bad happens.
Don’t forget the mysterious family trinket/ amulet/ sword/ ring/ necktie, that was always passed down from your grandmother… which just starts throbbing with menacing energy when you reach puberty…
The Tampon Of Destiny
Omg, I just snorted so hard I choked.
“Something that has not happened in a thousand years is happening.”
This is literally every high fantasy novel BUT I DON’T CARE, MALLORY, DO YOU HEAR ME? I DO NOT CARE.
Everything is guided by misogynistic sexual politics because HUMAN NATURE
You wind up traveling as part of a motley assortment of wanderers, united in their goal to destroy the Dark One and bring peace to the land. You can immediately identify the social status, moral alignment, and narrative function of each member of this band by their personal variety of British accent.
Someone you know has red, purple or yellow eyes, but they are described as “crimson”, “violet” or “amber”.
there are no observed female dwarves. when asked why the dwarves are forever evasive.
See the excellent webcomic, Alfdis and Gunnora. http://alfdisandgunnora.thecomicseries.com/
A dark and terrible man, will journey with you for his own greedy ways and vile goals, only to tell you tales of all the people he has killed or terrible deeds he has done, but by the end of the second to last chapter he will sacrifice himself to save you, and as he lays near death, he will 1. Not be sure why he did it and 2. Ask you, if one good deed, can wipe out all his past evils, and then die without ever getting a real answer.
I’ve been bingeing on Robin McKinley and Garth Nix for the last two weeks, and this is all so disturbingly timely I feel like The Toast has hacked my Kindle.
You befriend a misunderstood creature who is feared amongst your people, but discover it is really of an intelligent and sensitive race who is the keeper, I’m sorry, Keeper of Forgotten Lore.
I totally had an epic novel in mind that had most of those.
Plus a not-really-werewolf and an old blind hippie who was cursed with eternal life as punishment.
It’s been on the back burner in favor of grad school and silly short horror stories.
“You have red hair” while everybody else in your family, including your mother, long-lost father, and everyone in your village and the surrounding area, has dark hair.
Conversely, you have raven or ebony tresses, while everyone in your humble village has lighter hair. This makes you an object of suspicion.
Yes, we can all go read Diana Wynne Jones The Tough Guide To Fantasyland. If you haven’t read it, it is at http://www.amazon.com/The-Tough-Guide-Fantasyland…
Shut up and spend your money!
-You have a Good Heart that inexplicably saves your life and makes up for being a blithering idiot (sorry, I meant “ensures your eventual triumph, despite bad planning and hideous odds”). Your opponents are intelligent and morally bankrupt, while your simplicity and innocent joy in friendship saves you from temptation.
-Your author apparently has a very low opinion of other people. In the process of attempting to make you relate-able, they’ve turned you into someone limited, mediocre, self-effacing, and proud of being ordinary. This is supposed to be realistic or inspirational.
-The only reason you have any power is to defeat a great evil. It has been entrusted to you for that express purpose, and after you have done your part, it will be withdrawn so that you can go back to living an unremarkable life. You are entirely in agreement with this.
-The stories about your mentor, his mentor, etc. make it clear that the magical ability of people and the scope of conflicts is decreasing. (I.e., the reign of terror of the last Dark Lord overshadows the attempt of his successor) This also conveniently means that you are never your teachers’ equal.
-Many systemic problems like racism and sexism can be solved by physically defeating the person with the most offensive views. Everyone else sees the error of their ways the moment the bad leader has been humiliated and deposed. Others, like poverty, are never solved, but everyone takes it for granted that they are unsolvable.
-Your cause is lost and no good deed in the realm goes unpunished. Somehow, this conventional wisdom neither deters you, nor applies in practice. You bring with you all the justice the land has not seen in all these *many* years.
-Finally, as a friend puts it, “bad guys kill people. Good guys get people killed.” So if you never have to make difficult moral choices or tie up your own loose ends because your opponents just fall off cliffs at the appropriate moment, you’re definitely in a fantasy.
The cat sidekick/familiar/comedic relief never dies , because you do not hurt cats in stories. They are your furryfuzzywuzzy friends! 😀
Oh dear. Don’t read The Song of the Lioness.
Or the Beka Cooper series, for that matter.
Or Battle Magic…
Oof, I think I had blocked that particular part from my memory.
You are cold. You are so cold that you think you will never be warm again. Also, it smells, stinks of raw sewage and livestock. In fact, it’s so cold and smelly that you promptly forget about it by the next sentence
You are a high born girl, but you disguise yourself as a peasant boy to have adventures and or a slightly smaller chance of being raped as you flee your family’s murderers. You are petite and have a lyrical voice. You are better educated then everyone you come across. But you have short hair and wear breeches. No one sees through your ruse.
Most people you know wear jerkins.
The festival is soon approaching and you have to prepare for it, even though no one knows what the festival is celebrating.
In the beginning, there was only darkness.
You are untrained in Sword / Magic but have a latent gift that is brought out by a retired elder hero. Soon you are more proficient than anyone else.
I love these so very much.
All Purpose Folk Song, The Flash Girls’ PLAY EACH MORNING, WILD QUEEN. Be damned, I can find a clip of it.
http://www.last.fm/music/The+Flash+Girls/_/All+Pu…
The Internets are magical!
I really wanted to like it too. And by the end, it had instead reminded me just how much contempt it is possible for me to have for a book. (But the phrase “meebles at the feet of men” has made that entire reading experience worth it)
http://society6.com/emmajanefalconer/Fire-and-Hem…
Here you go, someone on the DWJ email list designed and sells them. There's this stuff available too: http://www.redbubble.com/people/tanaudel/works/12…
Or Battle Magic…
A group of Italian guys basically did this very thing. They trimmed the LOTR movies down to about 1/1.5 hour each and overdubbed them with their parody script. It became a story where the ring actually holds the power that allows people to get high, and that power needs to be released over the world (Gandalf is of course Ganjalf, Aragorn is Arabong and so on). It's a hoot but of course most of it would be lost in translation! I also have to admit I've seen it so many times that when I watch the actual movies I tend to overlay the parodied lines over the real ones…
I thought the evil prince was possibly the best royal available for the rulin' job. It's cold? Organize soup and blankets for everyone! Way more governmental competence than anyone else shows.
If he had just sniffled over Anna instead of gloating while she was dying, he'd have had it all.
In *utterly* Fantasyland, of course, the seasons depend on the mood the Faerie Queen or equivalent is in. I'm good with that. Otherwise, what you said.
wait, wasn't part of it built for two-and-four wheeled vehicles and then abandoned by the center polity and only *one* lane of the original maintained by the locals, who used center-wheel barrows which are incredibly efficient? AsyouknowBob given your name?
PLEASE DO EROTIC FICTION NOVEL NEXT. PRETTY PLEASE
There’s a very old hermit in the village who keeps to him/her self, but for some reason likes you.
You are a part of a loving Gypsy family that makes a meager living as a performing troupe. Everyone you know and love will be slaughtered by page 45.
The trait for which you were once mocked for will be the saving grace of The Land.
Your name sounds vaguely Ye Olde English, whereas your mortal enemy has loads of k,z,x and very few vowels in their name.
To be fair to London, it's so old it might be the source of that cliché.
Every other thing in this world – meteorological event, animal, celebration – is just two words stuck together to make a namephrase.
The women at court only seem to be able to express disapporval by sniffing with disdain and smoothing their skirts.
But very good with a sword.
You are The Chosen One
There is vast social and economic disparity in your feudal kingdom, and you are on the middle- to low end of it. Yet, somehow, you seem to have very convenient access to the corridors of power — the king, an exiled priestess, a regent of dubious intentions — either because your innate value is miraculously recognized, or because you stumble upon them by chance while you’re poaching from their land.
“Someone is eating an apple mockingly.”
Great post! http://booklexia.wordpress.com
"Someone is eating an apple mockingly."
Great post! http://booklexia.wordpress.com
I have a friend who is writing a fantasy novel. I was watching Shadow Recruit with her, and it's based on the idea of economic warfare. She didn't understand how it worked, so I paused the movie and spent a good 30 minutes explaining the basics of economics to her. It made me so happy when after my visit, she said she had no economy in her book and she really needed to fix that. My soul was glad.
You run to the village to help but a side character tells you its too late and your entire family is dead.
Before you can grieve or ask for details you need to defend the remnants of the village from something sinister and bestial; a recurring series of events makes you a hero in the Last Village.
The Council detains you for possessing some sort of power that only teenagers and small children seem to have.
You escape from the Prison/Facility (sinister place) and become the leader of a rebellion against right-wing Elders/Leaders.
You uncover their plot to do something bad with something that somehow holds sentimental value to you.
After a very heartfelt and predictable speech, the rebels pledge to help you in defeating them. But you’re almost too late, because the Elders already found your underground hiding spot.
Many of your friends die in the Assault/ Battle, and you cry over your hunky, 6’0, shorthaired, fair skinned male friend you grew up with.
Eventually you turn down the idea of living happily with him to keep fighting.
The Elders capture him and turn him against you.
You organize a final attack and succeed through a variety of ridiculously athletic jumps, quick-thinking, and pure luck.
And finally there’s a celebration scene and you humbly accept your position as the new Leader (or something).
Or even if you've never held a sword before, you become an expert swordsman in 10 pages or less.