This is specific to the videogame-ish sub-genre, mostly Isakeis…
But you go out of the way to include RPG mechanics into your story… but the only real influence it has on the storytelling is spending an inordinate amount of time grinding… a mechanic explicitly added to RPGs to pad the game.
There are good video game based stories, Survival Story of a Sword King and Dungeon Reset both immediately come to mind… but I feel like this is a widespread problem.
Just finished watching The 100 on Netflix. The writing was pretty terrible.
Literally every bad action performed by a character (up to and including genocide) was justified as “I had no choice”. They should have called it, “The no choice show”. I would have loved to have seen a counter in the corner of the screen that ticked up every time that was said, which was at least once per episode.
Seconds before any kind of solution that would have solved major problems was enacted, a character (different each time)- previously rational, but now for some reason completely chaotic- would jump in and destroy the McGuffin and fuck everyone over because it was in their personal interest. Every single fucking time, even in the final episode. It’s no longer a plot twist, it’s just lazy AF writing. It also meant that the characters had no consistency or predictability of motive, which meant their believability went down the toilet.
I’m going to stop there but believe me, that’s the tip of the iceberg.
That show was proof that Netflix will greenlight just about anything.
I remember seeing some sort of graph, where the number of made up words on the first page of a fantasy novel can be charted to a skewed bell curve of that novel’s average rating. One or two made up words tends to boost ratings slightly, but more than that and the ratings quickly decline. Because if an author is immediately dependent on introducing new words as a crutch for worldbuilding, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the book.
Ah yes, H’taln’k from J’briom-4, flying his Zal’t M’lort class Winger to the Mont Bronl’n port with the day’s haul of Sea Crom’t. Oh won’t his mabs’k be pleased with this delivery.
All things Deus Ex Machina. I get it, endings are hard. Climaxes are hard to write. But the payoff feels cheap as hell when your protagonist just “digs a little deeper” and suddenly finds just enough power to save the day. When it comes out of nowhere, it feels unearned by the hero and is not only unsatisfying, it’s also a good way to give you hero power creep until there’s nothing on earth that can believably challenge them. See: Superman.
I get what you’re saying, and I agree, but I think Superman is a bad example. Superman is meant to be infinitely powerful (with only a few examples like kryptonite to aid in storytelling). It’s a bit like the premise of One Punch Man. His story is meant to be about what one SHOULD do with infinite power, and the nature of morality, rather than overcoming adversity as with most superheroes.
In the early days of Superman comics, dude couldn’t, e.g. fly. He could just jump really high. He didn’t have laser vision. Over time, the writers kept adding new powers until the only story they could tell was about Supes vs his own conscience. Nothing else (okay, besides Mr Mxyzptlk) can actually stand in his way.
Ya, but my counterpoint is that, for a character named ‘Superman’, that’s kinda the point. Everybody gets power creep eventually. Remember the Thanos-copter, and Lex Luthor stealing 40 cakes?
Which is why I love enders game. Motherfucker was so brutal, the only thing slowing him down was exhaustion from killing EVERYTHING. The climax was about him realizing what he’d done
Yup. And that’s a great example of not relying on Deus Ex Machina - we watch Ender go through all his brutal training, learning to be the best and becomes a truly terrifying weapon of war. By the time Ender is, well, ending things, we’ve seen his growth and understand why he can do the things he does.
Most of the series past the first book is what I was referring to. It seemed like, for at least several books, there’s some big climax and he suddenly rediscovers some lost aspect of War Magic that saves the day, mostly unrelated to the rest of the book. It’s been over a decade since I read them though, so I might not be remembering it right.
Still enjoyed the series as a whole, despite a few things. Haven’t read sword of justice, but I might give it a try.
I think I generally agree. But it is like most the other things in the thread. The plot mechanic is fine when done well and bad when done poorly or as a cop out.
So I think most of us just hate shitty storytelling.
I started off really enjoying the series, but eventually had to abandon it as he kept adding increasingly over the strawmen who’s sole purpose was to be blown away by the might of Randian Objectivism.
Yeah, I always felt like the series would have been better as a single book (maybe the first and part of the second?). Playing with ideas of truth and perceived truth was cool, but it wasn’t enough to sustain such a long series.
Zero consistency to magic systems. I get it, having all sorts of spells in the story is fun and gives a lot of creative ways to make fights more interesting, but…
If teleportation magic exists, why don’t people who own it teleport everywhere?
If time travel magic exists, why isn’t everyone doing everything in their power to get it and use it? Looking at you, harry potter.
The villains usually have spells that are supposed to be ultra powerful and can kill anyone quickly but somehow it doesn’t work against main characters and there’s no excuse for why fights drag on for so long. Imagine seeing the villain introduced by vaporizing someone but never seeing them do it again.
Main character(s) breaking the rules of magic just because…
I’m a fan of stories like Avatar the last airbender or Witch Hat Atelier because their magic is very consistent. It makes things way more interesting when a character can’t just pull something out of their ass to save them in the middle of a fight.
Shoutout to every story that alludes to the fact that mages can run out of mana but is insanely inconsistent how and when it happens. Sometimes they spam spells for hours and sometimes it’s just “Oh no, I can’t use [spell] anymore because… Um… The plot says I can’t!”
And the imaginative variety. The magic system in the Mistborn series was fantastic and unlike anything I had ever read or even imagined. And then he adapted it consistently to an industrial age, and somehow made it work. Respect to Sanderson.
I can give the first half of Harry Potter a slack because it’s pretty laid back and whimsical. As soon as it tries to take itself seriously it kind of falls apart for me. God, deathly hallows sucked.
I stopped reading after the 4th book at release. Never really had interest in picking up the next couple of books.
When my interest in “well, might as well give it a go again” started back up, JKR started to go insane and now I don’t want to have anything to do with the series anymore
I remember when all the controversy started I thought wow, this must be exaggerated somehow, and sought out what she had actually said. Oh. My. Fucking. God. When she was challenged she didn’t just double down, she quadrupled down, and then some. Loathsome woman, just awful.
For a woman who wrote “it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.” She seems awful fucking concerned with what categroies people were born into.
If only there was an epic saga about the conquering power of love over bigotry that she could read. Maybe one involving a boy who lives or some fantastic magical beasts?
“It matters not what someone is born” is a very unfair sentence, what you are born can set the difficulty level of your life to extra easy or infinite pain regardless of your will and efforts. The anti-suicide nets off the windows of the iphone factories are not there for people born in a rich family.
Eliezer Yudkowsky can be a bit preachy at times, but he did a good job of pulling on threads in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to try to get to a fairly consistent model of magic
Same reasons I find extended comic universes to be appalling. Why don’t superheroes just use all of their powers all the time? Why isn’t the more powerful superhero conveniently here right now? Why do we have to pretend there is a struggle?
The minute 2 or more superheroes are put together, it’s basically ruined cause all their powers are only used as convenient for the story.
There’s a thing I heard somewhere about how your magical system needs to have a balance between how well it’s understood vs. how useful it is, or else it will break the plot.
If a magic system is extremely useful, then it must also be extremely mysterious, so that you can say “Well, it can’t immediately fix all problems because the gods work in mysterious ways.” Gandalf or Tom Bombadil seem incredibly powerful, but they don’t solve all of the problems in Middle Earth, and that’s okay because they’re terribly mysterious.
If a magic system is extremely well understood in-universe, then it has to have hard limits on how useful it is, so you can say something like “Well, the Law of Equivalent Exchange says that to solve all our problems would require a blood sacrifice of the entire population, so that’s not an option.”
If your magic is pretty well-understood AND very useful, then by all rights it OUGHT to solve all your problems, and when it doesn’t then readers rightly begin to question why any of the plot needs to happen at all (see, for example, the time turners in Harry Potter).
If teleportation magic exists, why don’t people who own it teleport everywhere?
Because you die and a copy of you is created.
If time travel magic exists, why isn’t everyone doing everything in their power to get it and use it? Looking at you, harry potter.
It can only be used by women who have borne children, to travel to a point before they bore children. Obviously, this means their child disappears from existence.
The villains usually have spells that are supposed to be ultra powerful and can kill anyone quickly but somehow it doesn’t work against main characters and there’s no excuse for why fights drag on for so long. Imagine seeing the villain introduced by vaporizing someone but never seeing them do it again.
The main character leaves his normal life when a villain’s casual disappearing spell actually “doubles” him, resulting in the origin of his heroic power.
Main character(s) breaking the rules of magic just because…
Because schizophrenia. Main character hears voices and they occasionally meld into a chorus in a way that produces unique magical outcomes.
Shoutout to every story that alludes to the fact that mages can run out of mana but is insanely inconsistent how and when it happens. Sometimes they spam spells for hours and sometimes it’s just “Oh no, I can’t use [spell] anymore because… Um… The plot says I can’t!”
hhahahaa, just like reload when dramatically appropriate.
Elves and Dwarves done like every other Elf and Dwarf. Especially when they go out of their way to give the Dwarf that overdone Irish/Scottish accent written out in damn near unreadable text.
Also when the worldbuilding and plot basically is “here’s some not so thinly veiled racism between groups who will set that aside to fight a common enemy.” Series ends on a high note, but you know this world will fall into disarray again cause people suck, so like, what was the point.
Elves and dwarves being monolithic cultures. I’d be fine the the standard stereotype if that was only one kind. There are so many kinds of humans, it’s hard to believe that there is only one kind of dwarf. Make Irish vs Scottish dwarves or something, cmon. Make dwarves Mongolian, idk.
Irish dwarves? Scottish dwarves seems to be the trope Do you have any example of irish dwarves. Except from leprechauns, whuch I don’t consider dwarves.
The Scottish accent is baffling. “Dwarves originate from Scandinavian mythology, so let’s give them a Scottish accent!” Elves (the human-sized kind) originate from Scandinavian mythology as well, why not give them Scottish accents?
The Chosen One who gets dragged around like a sack of potatoes until they Come Into Their Own and go on to Turn The Tide.
The Wise Yet Enigmatic Sage.
The Sharp-Tongued Princess.
The Rogue With A Heart of Gold.
Plots based on misunderstanding ancient prophecies that are so vaguely written they could be cookie recipes.
Gods that slot into neat roles on a godly table of elements.
Magic systems so detailed and prosaic you may as well call them technology.
Elves that are exactly like every other elf character you’ve ever read about except for one glaring but superficial difference which is there to make you think the author’s not plagiarising their own favourite author.
Elves that are exactly like every other elf character you’ve ever read about except for one glaring but superficial difference which is there to make you think the author’s not plagiarising their own favourite author.
For real. There has to be a better use of elves other than “they live in the woods and appreciate nature and hate dark elves or night elves or whatever your story calls them”
Now I want to read a fantasy comedy where someone trying to make cookies from an ancient recipe is whisked off on an adventure to fulfill the prophecy, but they just want snickerdoodles dammit.
I want the ancient recipe to be formatted like a modern blog post. You have to read the entire Silmarillion before you get to the list of ingredients and the instructions.
I honestly don’t understand the appeal of Robert Jordan. I made it through 50 pages of The Eye of the World before throwing it into the nearest little library. By then I had uncovered every fantasy cliche known to man, made even worse by the writing style of a 12 year-old.
I started that book over and over and just could not do it. But then my dad convinced me to read it further. I did. Got hooked by book three, and then got stuck in a loop of reading the series on repeat. Love it.
The Eye of the World suffers from being a fantasy work published in its era, when publishers wanted Lord of the Rings. So it’s basically Lord of the Rings. Chock-full of cliches because that’s what got published. The series gets significantly better from there on.
Jordan wasn’t without his shortcomings as a writer, but he was very good at two things I find most appealing in a fantasy author: worldbuilding and hard magic systems. This is the same reason I love Brandon Sanderson, despite his (comparatively) weak prose against someone like, say, Rothfuss.
He also, when he knew he was dying, managed to outline enough of his planned ending that another author was able to take it up and write the final three books of his series after he died, which is a really cool gesture for his fans.
-People don’t like traditional fantasy that takes itself seriously.
-People don’t like lighthearted fantasy that plays with the themes.
-People don’t like hard magical systems.
-People don’t like soft magical systems.
-People don’t like dragons being involved.
-People don’t like an absence of dragons.
-People don’t like character archetypes.
-People don’t like counterarchetypes.
-People don’t like when characters speak an understandable language.
-People don’t like characters meeting each other in common social meeting areas.
All good here? Great.
Just write whatever the fuck you want. There’s always an audience.
The way GOT ended with making the storyteller (the writer) become an important part of the story. The writers self insert is a problem in a lot of media but particular in fantasy.
Women and girls usually end up in a relationship by the end of the story and/or are the ones needing to be rescued. Its formulaic, boring and sexist due to the comparative lack of the opposite occurring. eg. men needing to be rescued.
Like… even if you did not give a single shit about sexism, its the same tired plot points over and over again. It has Hallmark channel writer energy. Create a second plot I beg you.
I agree with you on principle, but i feel it has reached a point where the circumvention of the classic tropes has created a new and also very formulaic stereotype: the “empowering“ woman. Must be strong, butch, evidently better than men in something typically associated with men, and if by any chance she is permitted to be classically feminine she must either be a lesbian or emotionally fucked up somehow. Bonus points for leather jacket and shades.
It is probably the better trope but i find it similarly boring at this point. Very performative and often with little relevance to the story being told.
They also can’t have any scars on their face that could make them less attractive. Hester shaw from the predator city books had her fucking nose cut off and the scar also took off some her her top lip yet in the fucking dog shit movie they made she looks like this https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/dd9d3a52-0e0f-4208-bd19-d6892410983a.jpeg
Now, to be fair, in the Punisher TV show they also refused to make pretty boy Jigsaw actor look as fucked up as his face really SHOULD have looked according to the comics.
Also why some characters that NEED to be wearing masks or helmets conveniently are not. Like in race cars or in space. Or the face protection is unrealistic so we can still mostly see them.
There’s also some funny times where comic characters who can’t breathe in space are merely wearing a small covering of the mouth, and maybe nose, but not eyes/ears.
I think it might be partially prettiness but I think it is mostly practicality. If the makeup is that difficult, it will take hours every day to put on. It can be hell on the actors. I remember reading about Peter Ustinov who played Hercule Poirot in “Murder on the Orient Express” but refused to do it for “Death on the Nile” because he did not want to have to wear that makeup in Egypt.
You have to make sure complicated makeup always looks consistent. It would have been really hard to do that in a series over multiple years.
One other example I can think of is Katniss in The Hunger Games. If you read the novel, her body was REALLY broken. I think her entire body was covered in burn scars. It would have been very hard to do that in the film consistently (though I will note that in the novels, the scars are not on her face. I saw it as symbolic of the inner scars of the Games).
So I think it is partially aesthetic but mostly practical.
That one is worse in my mind as baring steroids men will be physically larger and stronger than women. women should have motivetions other than marry a strong man (nothing wrong with wanting a good husband, I know many young girls looking for one - but please don't be the cardboard that is all I want)
And this writing style often results in complete lack of character development. Because how would you develop a character that is ideal from the start?
I recently read a collection of novels by a prominent 1960s science fiction writer. In three novels and 400 pages, I don’t think there was a single female character who advanced the plot other than by sexually entertaining a male character (Despite one of the books having a female title character, and another had a lot of minor female characters.) I know it’s a product of its era, but even then, there were more woman PhDs than men who’d been to space, so I think a good science fiction author ought to be able to at least imagine the possibility. I have nothing against female sexuality, but the most interesting women supplement it with some other talent.
Oh yes…this is SO lazy. There’s this immense potential for creative choreography that’s left untapped. Directors should really consult dungeon masters for this kind of stuff
There’s a meme floating around that suggests taking inspiration for wand using from conductors and I cannot stress how amazing every fight in Harry potter would have been if this was the standard.
Bringing Harry Potter into this, the fact that they showed they do know how to do this, when Dumbledore and Voldemort fought in the 5th movie, makes it all the more annoying that almost every other fight in the series was just shooting blasts and energy beams at each other
They actually pull this off well in Frieren. There are tons of different and unique spells but the one the MC always uses is the basic magic attack spell because she is stupidly overpowered she doesn’t need to be creative.
To me that is lazy writing. Specfic spells should have a set damage unless they are upcast. Maybe this is just the dnd player in me that thinks that though.
I think the other person doesn’t word it well. First, the fighting isn’t the main plot of the story, its more about everything in between. The MCs are powerful, but still need to be careful in their fights. or they will die.
The story doesn’t want dragon ball fights that are 20 chapters long, or have an impassible monster that de-rail the goal for 20 more chapters. Their obsticals are more about the world and people they interact with.
The magic combat system is pretty well thought out, but not complex.
The MC basically has lots of mana. That’s their “op” trait. They developed a stragedy to spam cast the basic damage spell.
I’m making up some numbers here to kind of paint a picture of how this “basic spell” work.
Attack spell =
1 second cast time
1 damage to defence spell
10/10 damage to unprotected person. (Can do 9/10 depending on what the plot needs)
Can be cast in a variety of directions. (I.e it’s not a gun, its a targeted missle)
cost more mana than the defence spell.
Defence spell =
.5 second cast
Can absorb 100 hits
low mana cost for small area over a short period of time, high cost to do “full coverege”. Its essentially a sheild they move around and resize to block attacks as they come. Fully protecting yourself burns too much mana and you’d lose.
For most hitting the defence spell a hundred times is a stupid stratagy, so everyone came up with different spells that break through it in a few hits.
Out MC instead trained the basic spell so much, they can cast it 20 times a second over a long period of time. This forces the opponent to burn mana trying to maintain defence. The opponent is overwhelmed and get hit. However the stratagy only works if they back the openent into a postion where they can’t counterattack or have a buddy attack MC from behind.
(The magic system isn’t DnD, so I’m spending way too much time making up a lot of shit here to give a general idea that no one really asked for. (And because its fun to brutely mash one magic system into another)).
Let’s say your average mid to high level mage has 100x spell slots (and for now assume all other stats are also equal). In this system, there are no spell levels. Instead, more complex spells require more slots to be used at once.
The basic defence and attack spell are 1 to 10. 1 defence spell blocks 10 basic attacks. However, you can’t attack and defend at the same time, and 1 defence is only for a small area. Full 360° coverage would cost a lot of slots per second. You conserve slots by precicly blocking the opponents spells as they come.
To break the defence you need to to be able to hit it really hard and follow up before they can cast more defence or counter attack. To do more damage in a spell, it costs more slots. This is where things like the other stats, skills, refelx time, unique spells, and combat stratagy become deciding factors in fights. Slot count also varies, a young mage might start of with one slot, but can become a very high level mage with 300 slots.
MC has 200 slots to start with and trained to get a very fast cast per second rate for both basic attack and defence. They are so proficient in the spell, it’s the equivelent effort of you or me walking.
While MC’s magic mistle does little damage, they can cast the spell 20 times in a second from multiple directions. This forces opponents to use up all their slots to defend until they run out or get overwhelmed by the numbers. The only defence is to do 360 defence, which can’t be maintained for long. (For simplicity sake, assume all the magic is a one shot kill. If you don’t defend or dodge, you die).
To make things more fun, MC has no idea they are insanly strong because their only reference growing up was their mentor who has the 5000 slot cheat code.
Yes, I am over thinking this. And yes, I should be sleeping right now.
To be clear, the magic system in this world is essentially technology. There is a set input and a destined output. The MC simply doesn’t care about fighting to learn any advanced fighting spells and just gatling-gun-spams the weakest attack spell until the opponent gets exhausted.
This ends up being brought up later, since a mage who’s sufficiently trained in fighting supposedly has a fair chance of defeating the MC. It’s a bit of a theme throughout the show about juggling the practical fighting applications of magic vs. the mundane but fun uses of magic
I absolutely hate the trope where they start out with something interesting and have to do a flashback to the parts that led up to it. Like I just had that happen with a sequel to a book I was reading, and I’m really struggling to get started. I fucking hate the
cold open to something dramatic happening
Record scritch “I bet you’re wondering how I got here. Well, it all started…”
bullshit trope and its really hard for me to look past some times.
You could always refer to the other time Dan Harmon referred to the same trope, with the Community episode where Abed is trying to tell the story through flashbacks, annoying everyone around him.
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