Top 10 WORST Fantasy Tropes

The ten worst, most hated tropes, cliches, and stereotypes in the fantasy fiction genre.

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[annathiessen]

I totally agree with the no romance unless necessary. In the book I am writing I have decided not to include romance as it doesn't make sense to what is happening in my story

[Pikeandglaive]

Olga!

Oh my god, I love that story! I've told it SO many times, and people think I'm, exaggerating. Then they read it and are like slack jawed!

[urgith]

It's fantasy, you can do whatever you want, unless specific youtuber dislike that, then you can't.

[icesedai]

The POC thing is legit, especially the fantasy part of this, like we can believe in elves, orcs and dragons but we can't believe anyone *wasn't* white? Lmao. My favourite Fantasy series has these tropes except sexism (!), but I've read men complaining on Goodreads that women are in power and that it's misandry but like cry me a river, imagine how all women have felt reading fantasy for the last 50+ years.

Re: ableism, Brandon Sanderson is writing a paraplegic character in a new book, asking for actual paraplegics on social media to reach out to him and help him write their perspective. I'm excited to see how that goes.

[DogWalkerBill]

The two fantasy tropes I hate the most are because of one series of books, "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant." These were written as an anti-Hobbit & anti-Lord of the Rings series. Each starts with Thomas Covenant in our normal world and for magic reasons, after 180 pages of exposition, he gets magically transferred to 'The Land' where he becomes (next most hated trope) The Reluctant Chosen One. He is a leper and only has 3 fingers on one hand. He wears a white gold wedding ring given to him by his ex-wife. White gold is super magical in The Land. so the locals identify them as the Prophesied "reincarnation" of their Chosen One, Eric Half-Hand, 'The White Gold Wielder'!
Thomas Covenant refuses to take up the call and refuses to take any responsibility for the disasters he causes by not doing so. He also doesn't know how to summon the white gold power he needs to defeat Lord Foul (the 100% evil baddy of the series.) He spends the first hundreds of pages of the first three volumes being a whining, crying, brooding, sniveling snot.
He dies around Book 8 and is replaced by female hero, Linden Avery. She becomes the new White Gold Wielder, and the series continues for another maybe 5 (long) books
Sometime I am going to have to go back and re-read these to figure out why I continued to read them in the first place.
Written and published over 40 years. I know at the end I was reading it because I had read that much of it and I was determined to finish it, no matter how much I hated it! (Also, I scanned through hundreds of drearily written pages to get the jist of the story without reading the dreadful prose.
Some people loved it. Wikipedia says it's a 'cult classic.'

[tophat]

Chivalry was a club, not every knight/lord belonged. Before Eleanor of Aquitaine the code of chivalry, many knights were just heavily armed thugs who did what they want to anyone lower on the pecking order than them. If you want realism in your novel, that is part of it.

[DogWalkerBill]

John Carter of Mars was the first character I know of that got magically transported from (mundane) Earth to (magical) Mars (Barsoom) to have his adventures. But this was a new trope in 1900 to 1920 when those stories were written.
In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy & Toto get magically transported "over the rainbow'" during a tornado.
C. S. Lewis also used this trope in The Chronicles of Narnia.
Alice fell down a magic rabbit hole.
Peter Pan took the children to Neverland.
So this trope can be used well.

Reluctant non-heroic-heroes were all the rage three or four decades ago. Thomas Covenant pretty much ruined that trope for me.

[ae_neo]

Not too serious but "African Americans" were not known to medieval Europe. I think it's reflexive of Americans but please be more careful, not all black people can be covered by that term. From an African.

[DogWalkerBill]

I sometimes watch Terrible Writing Advice. His regular comment (for terrible advice) is, "My plot sucks. What can I do? I know: I'LL ADD A LOVE TRIANGLE!" Problem solved!

[alithegeek]

Ya know what I’d do if I wrote fantasy? I’d populate a world with lots of realistic as well as fictional megafauna since in the real world, most of earth’s megafauna has gone extinct due to anthropogenic/climatic activities. Like the reason there are dragons in this fictional world is that they evolved to hunt mammoths, mastodon, moa, wooly rhino, giant ground sloths, straight-tusked elephants, megalania, diprotodon etc. and living alongside this ecosystem is just normal for humans in this world

[christianschwietzke]

It´s not technically a book, movie or show... but are you familiar with the third Elder Scrolls game, Morrowind? It avoids all the tropes on your list, other than the ableism (no disabled characters in the game), and it very nicely subverts The Chosen One - you become the prophesied Nerevarine not by being born (other being born "on a certain day to uncertain parents", which isn´t really all that special) or chosen, but by taking a certain series of actions. The setting (Morrowind province, where that game is set, not entire world of Tamriel) is very exotic, without no clear real-world culture serving as the model, the human characters include people of color, there´s LGBT+ characters (and none of them are villains or get killed off), men and women are largely treated equally (though some races have small stat differences between genders).

[thecreativeuniverseofjaya]

I loved your rant on love triangles! So sick of high school drama in all fantasy books. Ugh. Also "destiny/chosen ones" ugh

[FerDubh]

Trope #3 is problematic. Even ignoring what most "creative writing" teachers say ("Write what you know!"), if I (white euro guy) write a novel set in a place like China or Africa, wouldn't that be cultural appropriation (of the other folks' history)?

[Pikeandglaive]

By the way, an outstanding list.

I don't know if this is a trope, or a mechanism, or if its called something else, but one thing I have really grown tired of is the first chapter setup of a young (usually() male character being called to bed side of an aging or ailing mentor or family figure and being told "let me tell you something I have kept from you." and that is the setup (cough cough, . *info dump*) for the story. I suppose it worked at some point, (and I'm not a massive fantasy reader, so your mileage may very), but top me, at least, its a badly overused story telling tool at this point.

I will also confess, most of my writing that does fall into that genera does model medieval England, but that's largely because I've I've got a painful number of college hours invested into that slot of history. That being said, I desperately try not to fall into the other tropes you are talking about.

Also... THANK YOU for the call out on the 'chosen one" trope. That's another one that has really been bugging me lately. I mean, I have seen a few authors who I feel do it well, but yeah, its way too easy to botch it.

Outstanding work yet again!

[valdar]

In my novel, "Duskbringer, " set in my own fantasy world, the main character is a wood elf, and the various wood elf tribes in my world are based on a mixture of Native American cultural elements and norms. I do have two of the 36 cultures in my world that have a medieval European feel, but most of the people from the other cultures think of those two cultures as both stuck-up and prudish.